{"id":240733,"date":"2026-05-07T02:36:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-07T06:36:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/07\/the-cognitive-debt-of-digital-leadership\/"},"modified":"2026-05-07T04:35:10","modified_gmt":"2026-05-07T08:35:10","slug":"the-cognitive-debt-of-digital-leadership","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/07\/the-cognitive-debt-of-digital-leadership\/","title":{"rendered":"The cognitive debt of digital leadership"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.itweb.co.za\/article\/the-cognitive-debt-of-digital-leadership\/rxP3jMBEVdO7A2ye\">The cognitive debt of digital leadership<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.itweb.co.za\/article\/the-cognitive-debt-of-digital-leadership\/rxP3jMBEVdO7A2ye\">https:\/\/www.itweb.co.za\/article\/the-cognitive-debt-of-digital-leadership\/rxP3jMBEVdO7A2ye<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Publish Date: <a href=\"publish_date]\">2026-05-07 02:36:00<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Source Domain: <a href=\"www.itweb.co.za\">www.itweb.co.za<\/a><\/p>\n<p><span\/><\/p>\n<p>Antonios (Tony) Christodoulou, CEO and Founder, Cyber Dexterity. <\/p>\n<p>There has rarely been a technology in history that entered the boardroom as quickly as artificial intelligence (AI) has. Within 18 months of its public release, ChatGPT moved from being a curiosity to becoming an agenda item, and then a board-level expectation. CEOs are now under sustained pressure to demonstrate AI adoption to investors, staff and peers. The pressure is real, the timelines are short, and the question most often asked in executive committees is some version of: &#8220;Where are we in deploying this?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The question that has received far less airtime is: &#8220;To what end and at what cost?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>McKinsey&#8217;s State of AI 2025 puts numbers on the gap: 88% of organisations now report regular AI use in at least one business function. Only 39% attribute any EBITDA impact to it, and most of those say less than 5% of earnings are attributable to AI use.(1) The temptation is to read this as a technical maturity problem. The need for better integration, better data management, better governance, better execution capabilities and the value will follow. There may be truth in this, but a more or less obvious reason, which is invisible and harder to fix: organisations have rushed to deploy AI without doing the slower, harder thinking about what they actually want it to do, what they&#8217;re prepared to give up to get it and what they need to protect along the way.<\/p>\n<p>The blind spots are starting to surface in ways that should lead executives to ask the right questions and really think through their AI strategy. Over-reliance on AI can set an organisation backwards from its customer value proposition to its risk profile, a new form of denial of service for cyber criminals, for example, where an attacker who can quietly corrupt, poison or manipulate the data an AI model relies on can degrade the quality of every decision the business makes downstream without the system ever appearing to fail. Data illusion, the comforting sense&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.itweb.co.za\/article\/the-cognitive-debt-of-digital-leadership\/rxP3jMBEVdO7A2ye\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The cognitive debt of digital leadership https:\/\/www.itweb.co.za\/article\/the-cognitive-debt-of-digital-leadership\/rxP3jMBEVdO7A2ye Publish Date: 2026-05-07 02:36:00 Source Domain: www.itweb.co.za Antonios&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":240734,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.itweb.co.za\/static\/pictures\/2026\/05\/Antonios-Christodoulou-07May2026.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[20],"class_list":["post-240733","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificial-intelligence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240733"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=240733"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240733\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":240735,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240733\/revisions\/240735"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/240734"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=240733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=240733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=240733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}