Learning comes with discomfort: navigating governance and AI in a fast-changing world

Experienced lawyers have spent years building the muscles to manage regulatory change and organisational risk, but AI is now testing different muscles, says experienced in-house lawyer and governance expert Lynelle Bagwandeen.

For Lynelle, Group Company Secretary and Head of Global Company Secretariat for Prosus and Naspers, AI is not simply another technological leap or tool to master. Instead, it represents a fundamental shift in how lawyers work, how they manage risk. and how they will continue to be useful and relevant.

“It’s almost like adapting to a new environment or a new business model,” says Lynelle, speaking with Africa Legal ahead of next month’s GC Forum Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC) in Johannesburg. “That’s how monumental the shift feels, while still doing your day job where everything remains the same.”

Think of being on a ship that’s sailing across the ocean perfectly – only you are building a brand new, separate ship, right beside the moving one, she says.

While running back and forth on a plank between them. “That’s what my day job feels like currently,” she shares. “I’m manning a ship that runs perfectly. I know exactly how it works, but now I have to build a whole new ship from scratch using technology I’m not familiar with, and have to merge these two.”

For legal and governance teams, the skyrocketing use of AI in businesses raises challenges ranging from emerging regulation to confidentiality, discoverability, and the reliability of AI-generated materials. But there’s also a human risk.

“It’s the risk with adapting to AI, it’s the risk with using it, it’s the risk with training with it,” says Lynelle, who has been serving as an in-house lawyer across a variety of sectors for more than 20 years. “It’s the human risk of making people still feel valuable while training them on AI, and it’s this entire mind shift.”

Legal training can provide a valuable “inner compass”, believes Lynelle, as lawyers are accustomed to interrogating documents, identifying when something looks wrong, and navigating sensitive information.

Yet responsible AI and technology adoption also means accepting uncertainty.

“It’s about having a clear, defined set of rules,” she says, noting that with approaches to issues such as discoverability still evolving, she believes caution remains important, while also bringing its own contradiction.

“Being too cautious means you could be left behind. It can be very unsettling because you’re never quite sure what to do and how to do it.”

To be truly successful, lawyers need to become comfortable with discomfort, she says. Something that’s grounded not just in theory, but her own experience.

Lynelle’s in-house legal career has taken her from mining to banking, healthcare, and technology. An early decision to take a step back in seniority to enter banking with Absa in 2007, and learn a new sector, proved particularly formative.

“Was it difficult for my ego? Extremely,” she confesses. “But again, part of that was the discomfort. And from that change came even more learning.”

When deals dried up during the global financial crisis, another pivot took Lynelle towards governance, and eventually towards approaching the company secretarial role as a strategic contributor rather than simply an admin function.

“No one goes to university thinking you’re going to be a company secretary,” she laughs. Yet that unexpected direction became a defining strand of Lynelle’s legal career, and joining Naspers and Prosus in 2020 represented another conscious pivot, this time into a more specialised governance and company secretarial role.

“If you’re not willing to moult, if you’re not willing to reinvent yourself, if you’re not willing to take the risk to try something completely new, again parking your ego at the door, parking these beliefs that you’re defined by certain careers or titles, you are not going to grow personally and professionally,” says Lynelle. “You have to be open to learning, and learning comes with discomfort.”

For all the technological change that businesses, the legal profession, and the world is undergoing, Lynelle sees strong governance as an enduring foundation.

“The only time that G in ESG gets some greater limelight is usually when something goes horribly wrong,” she says. But effective governance depends on what she describes as constant daily checking and incremental improvements.

At the GC Forum GRC on 7 October, Lynelle will share her insights and expertise during a panel discussion on ‘Digital Exposure: Innovation, Risk & Accountability’.

As lawyers try to keep one ship sailing while building another, Lynelle believes sharing knowledge and what works matters more than ever.

“Shared lessons, shared experiences, shared models – it’s all so very important,” she says. “We’re all in this together. So the more we share on how we navigate these things and the tools we’re using, the better off we all will be.”

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