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Most companies operate with one of two assumptions about cyber disruption: that strong enough defenses will prevent it, or that a well-written business continuity plan will manage it when it happens. Our research, drawn from a global survey of 1,000 senior executives across 20 industries in 13 countries, suggests both assumptions are dangerously wrong.
October 6, 2026
In this week’s The Insider newsletter, technology editor Tom Stackpole shares a story from MIT’s Christian Catalini, who argues that when execution is cheap due to AI, verification
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Read more on AI and machine learning or related topics Generative AI, Technology and analytics, Data management, Organizational transformation and Digital transformation
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Somewhere in your company today, an expert rejected a perfectly plausible answer. A controller caught a revenue figure that counted deferred bookings. A security engineer blocked a release that passed every test but would have handed an AI agent write access to the production database. That override, escalation, or reversal is the most valuable data your firm produces. If you record enough of those moments and use them, alongside everything else your firm knows and measures, to train an AI model that learns from each correction, you could, in theory, eliminate the need for managers to route information and coordinate action. In doing so, execution gets turbocharged by automation. You might even be able to eliminate hierarchy altogether.