Research & Insights

The sales pitch is simple: add AI to your stack and you will work faster, look smarter, and finally “keep up.” What small businesses rarely see in the deck is the footnote: the same technology is making them a more attractive target. In 2025, four in five small businesses reported at least one security or data breach in the past 12 months, and recent analysis shows that a growing share of those incidents now involve AI somewhere in the attack chain (TechXplore, 2026). One r

There is a difference between using AI and disappearing behind it. It’s not just about “don’t trust the model too much.” It is about which tasks, if you outsource them completely, will quietly erode your judgment, your relationships, or your responsibility in ways that are hard to get back. We already know that people tend to lean too heavily on automated systems, a pattern researchers call automation bias, which is the tendency to treat automated recommendations as a short

If technology was supposed to kill boredom, it is doing a bad job. People today have near-constant access to entertainment, messaging, and on-demand information, yet self-reported boredom has gone up, not down, over the last decade (Tam, 2024). A recent perspective in Nature Human Behaviour argues that digital media does not just relieve boredom. It also raises our “desired level of engagement” so that ordinary, unstructured life feels more empty by comparison (Tam, 2024).

There was a time when staring at a blank Word document was just part of life. You opened the file, hated every sentence you wrote, rewrote it anyway, and somewhere between the third bad draft and the final one you learned something about the work and about yourself. Today, that same moment feels optional. If you are a student, you can paste the question into a chatbot and get a “good enough” draft in a few seconds. If you are early in your career, you can outsource the

Most people are being pushed to “try” AI products long before anyone explains why they should trust them. The result is predictable. Tools that are meant for convenience end up in workflows where they are making, or heavily shaping, decisions about grades, hiring, money, health, or access to services. The problem that the bar for using AI currently is “it looks smart and the demo is fun.” That is fine when you are turning a selfie into an ghibli character. It is much less fin

If you use a private AI tool to draft your emails faster, that is your choice. If a school, court, or welfare office uses a private AI tool to decide what happens to you, that is a different category of decision entirely. Right now, those lines are blurring. Governments and public institutions are under pressure to be “modern” and “data-driven”, and AI products are being marketed as the quickest way there. It is easy enough to plug in a commercial model to rank applications,

Over the last year, AI has gone from a side project to a headline phrase in almost every corporate strategy document. Surveys suggest that AI adoption is now mainstream. A McKinsey survey in 2024 found that 65% of organisations are regularly using generative AI, nearly double the share from ten months earlier ( McKinsey & Company, 2024 ). The 2025 AI Index reports that 78% of organisations worldwide used some form of AI in 2024, up from 55% the year before ( Stanford Institut

If arguments on the internet feel different lately or if they seem faster, sharper, and more circular, you are not imagining it. AI, rather than being another participant in these arguments, is increasingly becoming the stage manager. Most online arguments now start long before you type anything. They start when a recommender system decides what shows up in your feed. A 2024 PNAS Nexus study calls recommendation algorithms a force that “profoundly shape users’ attention

For a long time, the past arrived in a limited set of formats. They included grainy photographs, brittle film, fading monuments, and museum labels. AI is adding a new layer on top of all of that. It is deciding how history shows up to us. Start with the most literal example of color. A few years ago, a Japanese project used AI to colorize black-and-white photographs of prewar and wartime Japan, and the resulting book became a surprise bestseller, something that almost never

Friendship has always changed shape with technology. First it was letters, then landlines, then texting, then the strange emotional economy of sending someone a reel instead of asking how they are. So the arrival of AI companions is not some clean break from human connection. Rather, it is the next awkward extension of it. That is what makes this whole thing unsettling. Not because it is unimaginable, but because it is completely imaginable. Of course people would talk to mac

Most people are being told to “learn AI” without anyone explaining what that should look ok like on a Tuesday afternoon at their actual job. The result is predictable. Leaders say AI will boost productivity, while most employees say AI has mostly boosted their workload ( Upwork Research Institute, 2024 ). Being AI-useful is different from being AI-impressed. It means you can turn these tools into visible value for your team without becoming the person who secretly hates every

There was a time when most scams still carried a trace of effortlessness. Perhaps the sms was badly written or the caller sounded off. The story was just implausible enough to trigger suspicion. That advantage is disappearing. The Federal Trade Commission had warned that scammers are using AI voice cloning precisely because a call that sounds like your boss or your family member makes you more likely to act fast and ask fewer questions ( Federal Trade Commission, 2024 ). What

There was a brief moment when adding AI to a product still felt like a differentiator. That moment is ending fast. McKinsey’s 2024 global survey found that 72% of organizations are now using AI in at least one business function, while 65% say they are regularly using generative AI in at least one function, up sharply from the previous year. ( McKinsey & Company, 2024 ) Once that level of adoption sets in, AI stops looking like a special layer and starts behaving more like a

For a while, the dominant story around AI was speed. Which model was faster, which tool was sharper, which company shipped first, which product looked most magical in a demo. That story has not disappeared, but it is no longer enough. As AI systems move from novelty into work, education, public services, and everyday decision-making, trust is starting to matter more than spectacle. That shift is not abstract. Pew’s 2025 research found that 51% of U.S. adults say they feel mo

For a long time, software sat where we left it. It waited for instructions, completed a task, and disappeared back into the background. It was useful, but it was inert. What makes this new generation of AI tools feel different is not just that they are faster or more capable, but that they increasingly behave less like instruments and more like participants in work itself. That distinction matters a lot because people do not experience work as a sequence of isolated commands