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On 12 June, a national-security directive forced a frontier AI provider to withdraw two deployed models from every customer overnight. For the organisations that had built processes on those models, the capability did not degrade; it disappeared, with no notice period and nobody to negotiate with. It was the first observable proof of a risk that had until then only been described: that control governed elsewhere can be revised elsewhere, without consultation.
June's three articles circle a single principle from different chairs. AI and the CFO examines the first executive officer in the series, whose job has never been to produce the numbers but to stand behind them, and sorts AI's effect on the finance function into where it does the work, where it sharpens the judgement, where it operates out of sight, and where it changes almost nothing. The AI Sovereignty Trilemma returns to a framework I set out last year, now tested by events, and asks whether Boards know which of the Trilemma's costs they are paying and whether they chose it. AI and the CEO completes the executive set with the one office answerable on both counts and to the market besides, where PwC finds 74% of AI's economic value captured by just 20% of organisations, making the choice of bets, not the size of spend, the decisive act.
The pattern across the three is the distinction between agency and accountability. The doing of the work can move: to a machine, to an agent, to a provider. What cannot move is who answers when the numbers are wrong, when the capability vanishes, or when the bets fail to pay. Many organisations believed they had outsourced the operational risk of frontier AI; what they had outsourced was control, and the risk stayed home. The same logic runs through the finance function and the corner office. AI changes who produces, who builds, and who signals. It does not change who signs.
If your time is limited, I particularly recommend The AI Sovereignty Trilemma. The June withdrawal supplied, at someone else's expense, the demonstration that usually arrives only after harm, and the article sets out the questions a Board should be asking while the lesson is still free.
How is your organisation distinguishing between the work it has delegated and the accountability it cannot, and does your Board know which cost of the Trilemma it is paying?
- Mario
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