When ‘safe until proven otherwise’ becomes dangerous ... Over a century ago, in 1906, the first documented death from asbestos exposure was recorded in testimony. Yet it would take until the 1920s for widespread medical evidence to emerge, and until 2006 - 100 years later - for meaningful regulation to gain momentum with the Rotterdam Convention. The culprit? A confidence gap: industry and institutions trusted the material's benefits whilst deprioritising the evidence of its harms.

New enterprise AI research has identified a strikingly similar phenomenon: 78% of organisations claim full trust in AI systems, despite only 40% having implemented governance frameworks or ethical safeguards. Yet data shows that organisations prioritising trustworthy AI see significant ROI improvements.

Asbestos created a latency trap: disease took 20-60 years to manifest, making the causal link between exposure and harm almost impossible to see in real time. AI presents a different latency trap—one where harms (bias, hallucination, systemic risk) accumulate invisibly across populations and organisational timescales, often undetectable within quarterly performance reviews.

Is waiting for proof of harm before building governance a luxury we can no longer afford?

Profiled research:

Frontier AI use case developments:

Next-Generation Models Suggest Manufacturing Strategies for an AI Agent Society - https://amiko.consulting/en/the-ai-revolution-in-the-second-week-of-november-2025-paradigm-shifts-and-new-opportunities-looming-for-manufacturing/;

AI-Enabled Digital Twins for Public Health and Social Policy (Indonesia – Skyral) - https://edtechhub.org/2025/11/19/ai-observatory-waypoints-and-signals-issue-24/;

Semantic Digital Twins for Industrial Energy Optimisation - https://www.forbes.com/sites/feliciajackson/2025/11/04/the-rise-of-industrial-ai-from-words-to-watts/.

Applied AI developments:

Microsoft Frontier Firms and Agentic AI in Core Functions - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-cloud/blog/2025/07/24/ai-powered-success-with-1000-stories-of-customer-transformation-and-innovation/.

Trusted AI developments:

Guidance for Risk Management of Artificial Intelligence Systems - https://www.edps.europa.eu/system/files/2025-11/2025-11-11_ai_risks_management_guidance_en.pdf.

Feature AI development:

IDC Trust-Action Gap Study - https://www.sas.com/content/dam/sasdam/documents/20250124/data-and-ai-impact-report-the-trust-imperative.pdf.

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