Why have FO when there’s no MO?

If you are a business leader in 2026 trying to deal with AI, you are surrounded by fear on all sides. Analysts, investors, vendors and the media are all telling you that if you don't invest in AI, you should fear being left behind. At the same time, lawyers, risk professionals, privacy advocates and employee representatives are telling you you should fear AI harming your staff, your customers and your company's reputation.

Fear is rarely helpful in an enterprise setting. I once knew a large corporation which was desperate to move to cloud because they feared that their aging data centres could fail at any moment. But, after spending many millions to get their cloud environments ready, they wouldn't move their data because they feared security breaches. Fear drove double cost and double complexity.