The latest quarterly Gartner Emerging Risks Report provides an interesting look at how a number of risks are expected to develop over the next couple of years. It is based on a survey of 347 senior enterprise risk executives.
Mass generative AI availability was the top cited emerging risk in the survey and has been in the top five in the previous two quarters as well. Gartner describes this as ‘the risk that massively available generative AI rapidly surpasses organizational ability to understand associated risks and opportunities’. This is a risk that Gartner places in a listing of Potential Blind Spots – risks that organizations may be less aware of than other areas.
Gartner says that the potential consequences associated with mass generative AI availability include business continuity threats, explaining that: “Immature governance in GenAI organizations, coupled with reliance on a single AI vendor, [could lead] to significant investment losses or [threaten] core business functions/strategy around digital transformations.”
Resilience Forward comment
In the same way that cloud services have now become an important concentration risk, one of the aspects of the mass generative AI availability risk, as identified by Gartner, is that generative AI dependence might result in a similar form of concentration risk. If, in five years for example, most generative AI services are provided by a handful of large companies and the business world has built a reliance on these providers’ generative AI outputs, it is clear that there is a risk of over control and potential market manipulation by the big players. There is also a risk that if a big player experiences downtime – or worse, goes out of business – that would have large knock-on impacts around the world.
