Why have FO when there’s no MO?
Photo credit: Vadim Bogulov via Unsplash
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.
How should you cope with AI fear? There's good news and there's bad news.
The bad news is that nobody knows the answers. While AI has been around for nearly 70 years (the first conference on AI was held in 1956), the current form of AI, using transformer models, is less than ten years old - and mature commercial products are even younger (if they can be said to be truly mature at all). It seems likely that this generation of AI will bring social, economic and commercial changes, but it is much harder to say precisely what those changes will be.
If you doubt this, go back and look at early predictions about the PC (which we were going to use to organise our record collections), the mobile phone (which we were going to use to make voice calls), the Internet (which we were going to us to exchange research papers) or social media (which was going to bring people closer together).
The good news is that we can reduce the first type of fear - the Fear of Missing Out - by reflecting that Missing Out takes place over a rather longer period of time than many responses to new technology would lead you to believe. If your news feed is full of articles with headlines such as, ‘If you’re not using these ten prompts, you’re already falling behind!’ you might feel a sense of urgency and panic (especially if you’re not actually using any prompts at all). But you and your business are only missing out if there’s a scarce resource or unique competitive advantage that the technology offers - and that resource or advantage can only be secured now. Our experience of several decades of new digital technologies has shown that, for most companies, most of the time, the advantages offered by those technologies don’t vanish - after all, they are offered by companies with something to sell.
For example, consider Kodak, often offered as the canonical example of a global leader which destroyed itself by not moving fast enough to make the most of digital technology which it invented. Kodak filed for bankruptcy in 2012, but this was not the sudden collapse that is often portrayed: it took many years of decision and denial to get to this stage, not a single failure to respond to a new opportunity. During those years, the chance to pivot to digital persisted.
The even better news is that, if we aren’t driven by FOMO, then we have the opportunity to reduce the second kind of fear: the fear of being first, and of suffering unexpected and unimagined harms. If we remind ourselves that, even in a fast moving world, technology takes time to mature, and (if it is successful) continues to be available, we have time to understand and gain experience with that technology. Our experiments need not be a rush to value or immediate disruption: they can be true experiments, conducted in the interests of finding out the truth.
Since its invention, we have learnt that useful advances in computing stick around, and they tend to become more powerful, more stable and cheaper over time. There is advantage to moving with speed, but there is rarely advantage to moving with fear. Once we realise that there is little chance of MO, we can see that we have little reason to FO.
