Canada

AI vendors and AI-based companies are taking advantage of an often-overlooked asymmetry in how value and risk work.

MBA brain thinks: task makes us $500, has a 1% chance of making a mistake that costs us $200. So expected value is: 500-200x0.01, or $498. So if I can use AI to do task twice as fast, it’s all upside!

Reality is: value-adds tend to be situational, and risk tends to be systemic. If you do task x2, you might not see any actual extra profit as a result — due to dependencies, diminishing returns, and maybe supply and demand, that value might just fizzle out.

But if you make a small mistake, and then someone else makes a small mistake while building on top of your work, and so on… that risk compounds quickly and spirals out of control.