Innovation Brief · IB-2025-09a · September 2025
The AI Inflection Point
Will today's intelligence revolution become a progress trap?
AI can perform at and beyond human levels. Without ethical grounding, its advancement risks outpacing our wisdom to control it.
- Authors
Troy AzmoonSVP, Platform Experience
Simon GriceSenior Director, Innovation Office
- Length
- 17 pages
- Themes
- Trust & Security, AI Strategy & Maturity, Business Reinvention
Summary
- Artificial Intelligence delivers unprecedented ability to perform at and beyond human levels, but without ethical grounding its advancement risks outpacing our wisdom to control it.
- The AI boom mirrors past progress traps, where short-term gains lead to long-term harm.
- Trust frameworks must underpin AI development. Without verifiable security and safety, even ethical systems can fail — risking manipulation, malfunction and the erosion of trust at scale.
- C-suite leaders must shift from AI adoption to AI accountability, asking what AI can do and what it should do.
- By fostering a paradigm centred on AI trust, businesses strengthen customer loyalty, reduce regulatory and reputational risk, and unlock more sustainable long-term value from AI investments.
From the brief
Smartphones gave this generation more information and computing power than any before it — along with screen addiction, social isolation, threats to privacy and mounting e-waste. The technology isn't broken; smartphones are doing exactly what they were built to do.
Throughout history, significant technological advances have created adverse effects that offset and even outweigh the progress made. These progress traps threaten not just the technology's success but how society functions.
Read the full report