YPO Technology Network AI Brief

AI exposes the layers, hand-offs and busy work inside a company. Stephen Forte explains why leaders should redesign the work before cutting jobs or flattening the organization. In this episode: Three restructuring announcements. NiCE, Canva and SUSE named AI among their reasons for change, alongside other business pressures. These are not simply AI layoffs. Readiness exposes waste. Preparing for AI reveals weak data, inappropriate access and the hand-offs between a request and a result. Double clutter. Email and Excel create work on both sides of a request. Count the relays before changing the org chart. Sequence the change. A Harvard Business School AI Institute working paper links AI capabilities with flatter hierarchies and wider managerial spans. The effects were stronger where people had the skills to use the technology; they were not automatic. Evolution, not revolution. Reinvent the work first, then decide which layers to remove and how to organize the people you need. Operational expertise matters. The people who understand accounting, sales or marketing can tell an agent what good looks like. Tool knowledge alone is not enough. Train people and remove friction. Investment in training signals confidence in the team. Start by automating the spreadsheets and recurring reports people hate, giving them back the work they were hired to do. One practical starting point. Pick one process, count its hand-offs and emails, automate the frustrating part, then reassess the layers. Sources: NiCE, Nov 4: Quarterly results and restructuring announcement Calcalist, Nov 4: NiCE workforce and financial context TechCrunch, Nov 4: Canva restructuring The Register, Nov 2: SUSE restructuring Harvard Business School AI Institute, Nov 3: The Future is Flat The AI Brief from the YPO Technology Network is a daily executive briefing on the AI developments that matter to business leaders. Hosted by Stephen Forte.

Goldman Sachs just limited who can use its strongest coding agents. Stephen Forte asks who should get those power tools in your company. In this episode, Stephen Forte covers: Goldman's October change. Bloomberg (Nov 2): Anthropic's Claude Code and Microsoft's GitHub coding tools are now for engineers. Traders and bankers lost access; the quant "strats" are exempt. Spokesperson Nick Carcaterra said that after experimenting on productivity and risk, they put the tools with those best suited to leverage them long term. A real shift. In July, CIO Marco Argenti had praised vibe coding by traders and bankers who built tools and handed them to one of 12,000 engineers to polish. Earlier in 2026, Goldman had already restricted Claude for Hong Kong staff over confidential data going to third-party AI tools. Respect the bank. Stephen will not question Goldman's call. Banking's regulatory environment is unique. Pulling coding agents back to engineers after experimentation is risk management where a bad tool can leave with client data. Most companies are not Goldman. Builders outside engineering should get coding agents, 100%. Tools should go first to subject matter experts, who truly understand the problem. IT's job. An engineer fixing accounting without understanding accounting is a mistake. IT should support subject matter experts, lift their skills and manage their code inside the company's accepted stack. The real risk. Neutering your most experienced people and denying them modern tools. Those people will leave for a place that will give them the tools. Stay inside the approved stack. Non-confidential prototyping elsewhere is usually fine. Operate inside tools the company already approved. Even Microsoft Copilot is getting better every day. Replit's counterpoint. CEO Amjad Masad said agents on employee laptops are a systemic security risk and the ban hammer is coming down. Control what agents can touch and where they run; don't confuse that with locking out subject matter experts. Juniors and judgment. Partner Chris Churchman warned heavy AI use can degrade reasoning. Stephen's view: juniors learn through structured use of AI. AI does busy work and calculations; people own judgment. A large language model cannot replace human judgment yet. Tokens as expenses. Garry Tan of Y Combinator spends $100K to $200K a year on tokens. Stephen's rule: no hard caps by role. A gate for everybody through management, with deliverables that show value, same as justifying a $2,000 business trip. Sources: Bloomberg Law (Nov 2, 2026): https://news.bloomberglaw.com/capital-markets/goldman-restricts-traders-and-bankers-from-using-some-ai-tools Quartz (Nov 2, 2026): https://qz.com/goldman-sachs-restricts-ai-coding-tools-traders-bankers-110226 CNBC, Chris Churchman (Aug 24, 2026): https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/24/goldman-sachs-ai-partner-danger-skills.html Tech in Asia, Goldman Hong Kong Claude restriction: https://www.techinasia.com/news/goldman-sachs-restricts-ai-coding-tools-engineers The New Stack, Amjad Masad (Nov 3, 2026): https://thenewstack.io/ai-coding-agents-security/ TechCrunch, Garry Tan tokens (Nov 2, 2026): https://techcrunch.com/2026/11/02/y-combinators-garry-tan-uses-ai-agents-so-much-he-spends-up-to-200k-a-year-on-tokens/ The AI Brief from the YPO Technology Network is a daily executive briefing on the AI developments that matter to business leaders. Hosted by Stephen Forte.

An agent can't follow a rule it can't read, and at most companies the rules live in PDFs, shared drives and people's heads. Stephen Forte walks through the step most companies skip before handing work to an agent: writing one process's rules down, in one place a machine can read. In this episode, Stephen Forte covers: Machine-Readable Government. On Nov 2, Abu Dhabi and OpenAI rewrote a defined set of policies so an AI system can check a case against the rules and link each recommendation to the exact clause. An official verifies, corrects or overrides, and a person makes the final decision. The first pilot. Food import registrations at Abu Dhabi's food safety authority: about 20,000 a year, drawing on 1,400 policy documents, some over 700 pages. Routine checks that took days now take minutes. Construction permits, licensing, HR compliance and procurement are next. The caveat. It is a self-announced pilot with no independent results and no published error or override rates. The lesson doesn't depend on them. Your company's permits. Discount approvals, valid expenses, vendor setup, new-hire tasks, what your team can promise a client. Those are rules, applied every day. Where the rules live. Wikis, PDFs, forms, SharePoint, employee manuals. A good employee knows who to ask. An agent applies whatever version it's given, with complete confidence. Stale copies, not conflicts. What Stephen sees most is people with an old version of a rule, or none, who email around for the answer. The answer depends on who they asked. One queryable repository. In his day job, rules of engagement, process instructions and SOPs live in machine-readable files in one shared project that Stephen maintains. One version, changed there first, and the place an agent should start. What machine-readable means. Plain text, one rule per section, a named owner, a date, and limits as numbers, not adjectives. "Discounts over 15% need regional VP sign-off" is checkable. "Large discounts need approval" is not. It has to come from the top. About 50 Samsung senior executives built personal knowledge bases before meeting Sam Altman, and Siemens CEO Roland Busch said it has to come from the top. If the CEO asks the repository first, the team follows. Where to start. Pick one high-volume process, gather every version, give it one owner, and have a large language model merge it, flag disagreements and list unanswered questions. Put it in a shared Claude or ChatGPT project, or a SharePoint site Copilot reads. For a month, answer emails with "ask the repository." Sources: Abu Dhabi Media Office (Nov 2, 2026): https://www.mediaoffice.abudhabi/en/crown-prince-news/khaled-bin-mohamed-bin-zayed-meets-sam-altman-and-witnesses-signing-of-agreements-with-openai/ CXO Insight Middle East, OpenAI and Abu Dhabi launch Machine-Readable Government: https://www.cxoinsightme.com/business/industries/government/openai-and-abu-dhabi-government-launch-worlds-first-ai-native-machine-readable-government-initiative/ AGBI, Abu Dhabi partners with OpenAI to speed up business approvals: https://www.agbi.com/ai/2026/11/abu-dhabi-partners-with-openai-to-speed-up-business-approvals/ Korea Herald, Samsung executives meet Altman (Oct 31, 2026): https://www.koreaherald.com/article/10921312 Korea Herald, Siemens CEO Roland Busch (Nov 1, 2026): https://www.koreaherald.com/article/10921699 The AI Brief from the YPO Technology Network is a daily executive briefing on the AI developments that matter to business leaders. Hosted by Stephen Forte.

Most exposure in a company comes from mistakes, not villains: access opened for a good reason and never closed. Attackers now find those leftovers in hours. In this episode, Stephen Forte covers: Binance. About $6.3B stolen. Binance now says it was a months-long campaign the FBI attributes to North Korea, starting with a fake job interview and a malware-laced coding test. AI speed. Storm-0940 reached privileged cloud access in under three hours. Unit 42 saw two weeks of attack work done in under ten. Day job. What his team finds in client tenants, and when to call a specialist. The full checklist (ask for a number, a list, or a screenshot): 1. Global/super admins, cloud root, registrar, DNS owners, by name. 2. Standing vs just-in-time admin rights; separate admin accounts. 3. High-privilege service accounts and app registrations, with owners. 4. MFA % enforced, not registered; exceptions and approvers. 5. Phishing-resistant MFA for admins and finance; legacy auth blocked. 6. Accounts idle 90+ days, ex-staff still enabled, guests. 7. Last access review on finance, HR, CRM, customer data. 8. Project access opened in 12 months, and closed? 9. Secrets in repos and history; how many still work? 10. Where API keys live; rotation dates; revoke at the issuer. 11. Every AI-provider key and who pays. 12. Domains and subdomains (crt.sh), each with an owner. 13. Test, staging, demo servers still running with real data. 14. Old sites and WordPress installs patched or retired. 15. Shodan view of your IPs: open databases, admin panels. 16. Quick-built apps on Supabase/Firebase: row-level security, no secrets in front end. 17. Public buckets and "anyone with the link" shares. 18. Anything that can delete production databases or sites. 19. Which notetakers are in use, sanctioned or personal. 20. Transcript default sharing, who sees all, retention. 21. Board, HR, legal, M&A calls: no bot or restricted. 22. Third-party OAuth apps on mail, files, CRM; admin consent. 23. Top 10 vendors: recent breaches, tokens rotated. 24. Immutable backups and last tested restore, incl. M365/Google. 25. DMARC at enforcement, SPF, DKIM on every domain. 26. Bank-detail changes: call back a number on file, dual approval. 27. External auto-forwarding blocked; inbox-rule alerts. 28. Log retention and alerts (new admin, MFA off, mass download). 29. Endpoint protection on every laptop. 30. Written incident plan; who calls insurer, counsel, IR firm. 31. Tabletop exercise with the CEO in the last 12 months. 32. Quarterly one-page cyber report to the board. 33. Cyber insurance answers match reality. Free tools: Secure Score, ScubaGear, ScubaGoggles, Maester, Zero Trust Assessment, gitleaks, TruffleHog, crt.sh, Shodan, Prowler, Have I Been Pwned. Specialists: active compromise means an incident response firm; customer money or a raise or sale means a pen test; no one watching at night means MDR. Sources: CoinDesk on Binance (Nov 3): https://www.coindesk.com/business/2026/11/03/binance-s-usd6-3-billion-hack-began-with-a-fake-job-interview-exchange-says Microsoft on Storm-0940: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2026/10/21/storm-0940-uses-artex-agentic-ai-connectwise-supply-chain-compromise/ The AI Brief from the YPO Technology Network is a daily executive briefing on the AI developments that matter to business leaders. Hosted by Stephen Forte.

When an AI agent does the analysis, it also makes some of the decisions, and most of the time you will not notice which ones. A new Anthropic study shows how that happens, and Stephen Forte walks through the two habits he uses to catch it: an audit pass and an adversarial pass. In this episode, Stephen Forte covers: The study. Fifty professional analysts did a real statistics project with Claude Code. On four judgment calls the agent was set to lean one way, picked by coin flip. Analysts went with the lean 86% of the time. No lies, just one side. The agent argued for one option and usually spoke first. 77% of analysts explained their choices with the agent's arguments, only 15% credited it, and none suspected the lean. The limits, and the bigger risk. One task, one field, one model, an amplified lean. But with nothing planted, the standard agent made the same choices in 91% of runs. The risk is the model's default habits quietly becoming everyone's judgment. What Stephen sees. Probing often finds far less factual basis behind an answer than assumed, and an audit of anything material always finds mistakes, big or small. The audit pass. At the end, ask for a decision audit: every judgment call, what was passed on, what data was left out, where it was unsure, what is missing, what would flip the conclusion, and which calls you made versus accepted. What is missing. A wrong number jumps out. A missing customer segment or a missing year of data does not. One honest caveat. A model explaining itself afterward can be plausible yet misleading. Treat the audit as a list of choices, not proof of why. The adversarial pass. Ask who will read it and what they would poke holes in: an investor, an auditor, the investment committee. Run it in a fresh session or a different model. In one study, debate beat a single model arguing one side, 88% to 78%. Build it into the workflow. Save both prompts one click away in Claude, ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot or Grok Bot, make it a checklist step, name the human-owned calls in advance, and write your own view first on the big ones. Skip it for a pasta recipe. Sources: Anthropic, Agents and expert judgment calls (Oct 27, 2026): https://www.anthropic.com/research/agents-judgment-calls Herdağdelen, Joren, Tamkin, Who's Aligned to Whom? (paper): https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/519c17a5d23a794e8b6d50a854048d0b61e0d73a.pdf Decrypt, AI can quietly influence experts' decisions: https://decrypt.co/382065/ai-can-quietly-influence-experts-decisions Turpin et al., Language Models Don't Always Say What They Think (2023): https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.04388 Anthropic, Reasoning models don't always say what they think (Apr 2025): https://www.anthropic.com/research/reasoning-models-dont-say-think Khan et al., debate vs a single consultant (ICML 2024): https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.06782 The AI Brief from the YPO Technology Network is a daily executive briefing on the AI developments that matter to business leaders. Hosted by Stephen Forte.