How Prática Is Rewriting
Diversity for the AI Era

I was reading a paper on “Conselheiros” in Brazil, just to understand a bit more how this market is evolving, the triggers, drivers and some criteria, when suddenly I found myself diving into the topic of diversity – THIS was the trigger that hit me. It is not about technology.

Imagine a boardroom where diversity doesn’t just mean a woman, a minority, or a technologist added to the roster—but an infinite spectrum of voices converging through human + digital clones, deliberating in real time. That’s not science fiction—it’s what companies like Prática in Brazil are experimenting with today.

Prática, a Brazilian firm in the food-service equipment sector, recently announced something audacious: it’s bringing Ghion.AI, a digital clone of executive André Ghion, into its Board of Directors alongside its human. The clone is not a passive tool—it’s able to “discuss scenarios, recommend frameworks, enhance the level of certain debates by bringing alternative perspectives and orient actions” within strategic deliberations.

This is a landmark case—and a hint of what’s next for diversity in governance.

From Demographic Diversity
to Cognitive Multiplicity

Board diversity has long been about optics, representation, and bringing underrepresented human voices into leadership. That remains vital. But the next frontier is embedding cognitive diversity at scale—a move from who you are to how you think, how you compute, how you simulate, this opens up for a landscape that broadens the width of cognition, strategy and many other levels.

In Prática’s case, Ghion.AI is trained on the human André Ghion’s decision history, values, thinking style, and domain data—but it can vary parameters, run counterfactuals, and push boundaries in ways that a single human would require larger amount of time and processing capability to reach similar outputs. The clone can challenge, dissent, push the extremes, provoke tension, and thus expand the “diversity envelope” of board deliberation.

In effect:

• Where you once had one voice embodying a perspective, you now have multiple variants of that perspective (and potentially beyond) trading in time and space.
• The board becomes not a fixed panel of personalities but a constellation of minds, human and artificial, iterating in real time.

Why This Amplifies Performance
(If Done Right)

1. Exploratory robustness
   Because clones can simulate many “what-if” paths in parallel, the board can better stress-test strategies. Risks that humans overlook might emerge in variant simulations.
2. Reduced cognitive overload
   Boards suffer from time constraints, selective attention, and bounded rationality. A clone can monitor, pre-filter, summarize, and flag anomalies or opportunities that might slip through human filters.
3. Institutional memory + continuity
   When human directors rotate off boards, much tacit wisdom evaporates. But a well-constructed clone preserves not just data but heuristic logic, decision heuristics, and institutional patterns. It can mentor new directors, compare past precedents, and prevent “reinventing the wheel.”
4. Ethical guardrails and diversity bias mitigation
   Because digital clones can be audited, forked, retrained, and constrained, they enable a kind of “surgical diversity”: you can embed counterbias training, marginalized heuristics, or systemic thinking modules. In effect, you amplify the ethical sensibility of a diverse board.
5. Acceleration of iterative strategy
   Instead of waiting for quarterly board meetings to course-correct, clone-augmented boards can iterate with higher frequency, responding to signals faster while preserving governance discipline.

Prática’s Move Is Bold

Prática’s experiment is not just symbolic—it is a stress test of the possible and it may open questions about ownership, transparency, bias, ethics, and even deeper diversity. But it also surfaces many open problems.

Still, as a pioneer in Brazil, Prática is doing more than experimenting—it’s tacitly issuing a strong signal: the future of boards can be read as multiplicity.

The Diversity Next Step:
Mixed Boards of Flesh and Logic

Let me posit what I think the next wave will look like:

• Boards of hybrid membership: some seats held by humans, some by digital clones, some by external algorithmic “third-party experts.”
• A cognitive diversity index (CDI): a metric for how varied your board’s thought-space is—how many axes of variation (risk tolerance, ethical bias, domain models) are present.
• Diversity as an algorithmic design parameter, not just a hiring quota: you actively design the clones’ variance criteria to ensure boundary-spanning thought.
• Governance layers for clones: human override, audit trails, clone-to-clone debate protocols, versioning, rollback capabilities.

Here is the what will bake our noodle (just as the Oracle in Matrix said): in a few years, the question will no longer be “how many xyz are on the board?” but “how many modes of thought are in the board’s decision fabric?”