The AI risk nobody is talking about

Businesses are building AI into their operations faster than ever. That’s mostly a good thing. But there’s a risk emerging that I don’t hear discussed enough, and it’s one I think about a lot.

Over the last year, I’ve watched businesses move quickly to embed AI tools into their day-to-day operations. Automating reporting. Setting up agent workflows. Building processes around large language models. The efficiency gains are real, and the pace of adoption is only going to increase.

But here’s what concerns me. A lot of this is being built by individuals: a developer, a marketing manager, an ops lead, who understand the tool well enough to make it work. They set it up, it runs, and the business starts to depend on it. Quietly, without anyone quite intending it, that person becomes a single point of failure.

When they leave, or move roles, or just get busy with something else, the business is left with a process it relies on and nobody who fully understands it. Sound familiar? It should, it’s the same thing that happened with bespoke software builds in the early 2000s, and with custom CMS setups a decade later. Every time a powerful new tool arrives, the same pattern plays out.

The answer is making sure the knowledge is institutional, not held by one person who might leave next quarter.

This is one of the reasons I think working with an external partner, even on a lightweight basis, is worth more now than it was five years ago. A good agency brings cross-client visibility. We see what’s working (and what isn’t) across dozens of businesses, in different sectors, at different stages of maturity. When we help a client implement an AI-powered workflow, we’re not just building it, we’re documenting it, sense-checking it, and making sure it doesn’t become a liability the moment the person who built it is no longer around.

I’m not arguing for dependency on agencies — or on any single external partner, for that matter. The point is to avoid concentrating critical knowledge in one place, whoever holds it.

The businesses that navigate the next few years well will move fast on AI and build in the oversight and documentation to match. Speed matters. So does keeping an eye on the foundations.

Sean Dwyer is Managing Director at Door4.