The most important board work happens between meetings. So we rebuilt 21st.

Ask ten board members what the board's most important task is, and you'll likely get several answers: hiring—and, if necessary, replacing—the CEO, exercising control and supervision, or setting the strategy. But regardless of the emphasis, the board fulfills its role through decisions: preparing them, making them, and following up on them.

And if you've served on a board yourself, you know this: the meeting itself is just the visible part of the work. The real work—and the real risk—lies between the meetings. In the preparation. In the follow-up. In keeping track of an issue through weeks, months, and multiple meetings, often across both the board and management.

The tools were built for the meeting, not the decision

Yet, almost all software for board work is built around the meeting and the document, not the decision. An issue exists as an item on an agenda, an attachment in a meeting notice, a paragraph in the minutes. When the same issue reappears three meetings later, the thread is often lost. Not because people are disorganized, but because the systems were never designed to follow a decision throughout its entire lifecycle.

This is what we've changed

We have rebuilt 21st from the ground up, changing the underlying data model so that the decision, not the meeting, becomes the unit everything revolves around. AI is at the core, not bolted on top, and that's precisely what makes such a model practical: you can ask the system for what you need in plain language, and it understands the context.

For a board, the tangible benefit isn't "AI," but something more practical and valuable: every decision gets a coherent, traceable history—prepared, processed, and followed up. A complete trail, not scattered fragments.

What this means in practice

It may sound abstract, so here's what it means in concrete terms:

• With the Annual Wheel (coming in V3), you can follow an issue from start to finish, through all the meetings it passes through, in both the board and the general assembly. A task system designed for what the board actually needs.
• The Document Archive uses AI to classify and place your documents correctly, automatically. It has already been tested at scale by ECIT, which has onboarded 100 of its companies with a complete history of all previous meetings.
• With DocDrop, someone outside the board—for example, an external accountant—can securely deliver documents for a meeting via the person organizing it, who retains full control of the agenda.
• And a new, dynamic shareholder register handles everything from the smallest change to transactions in the largest publicly listed companies—and just in time, because from June 2026, Altinn will be closing its manual form for share registration.

The bigger picture

But the most important thing here isn't a single feature. It's that software with AI at its foundation can take on work that previously required people. This changes what's possible—not just for us, but for the way companies are run.

We don't believe this means everything has to go faster at all costs. But it does mean the bar is raised. As this type of infrastructure becomes commonplace, owners, investors, authorities, and partners will expect decisions that are better prepared, better documented, and more quickly followed up on. Not more haste—but less room for error.

For a board that wants to do its job properly, this isn't about keeping up with a trend. It's about continuing to ensure good decisions, properly prepared and followed up—now to the standard our times demand. This is also why we are well underway with the work towards ISO 27001 certification: if the largest companies are to trust such a foundation, its security must be proven.

The road ahead

21st version 3 will be launched at the end of June. We have worked on this for a long time, and we are proud of what we've created—not because it's new for the sake of being new, but because it strikes at the core of board work. We will share more in the weeks leading up to the launch. If you want to stay updated, or share a thought on where board work is headed, we'd love to hear from you.