In January 2024, a finance employee at engineering firm Arup joined a video call with the company's CFO and several colleagues. Every one of them was a deepfake. By the time anyone checked, 15 transfers totalling $25.6 million had gone out (CNN, May 2024). That was a global firm. The same tools now cost little or nothing, and smaller businesses are easier targets because there are fewer checks between a request and a payment. The numbers say this is no longer rare: - The World Economic Forum's Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2026 found 73 per cent of organisations were directly affected by cyber-enabled fraud in 2025, and CEOs now rank it above ransomware as their top cyber concern. - The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center recorded $2.77 billion in business email compromise losses across 21,442 incidents in 2024. - McAfee research in 2023 found as little as three seconds of audio can produce a voice clone with an 85 per cent match. I trained in audit at PwC and KPMG. Here is the uncomfortable lesson from that world: you cannot train people to spot a perfect fake. You can only design a process where a perfect fake still fails. Five controls that cost nothing and take an afternoon: 1. Call back on a number you already hold. Never on a number given in the request. This one step defeats most voice and video scams. 2. Two people approve any payment above a set amount. Neither can be the person who received the request. 3. Treat a change of bank details as the highest-risk event in your business. Verify it through a second channel and hold the first payment for 24 hours. 4. Agree a code phrase with your partners and finance team for urgent requests. A clone cannot know it. 5. Make urgency a red flag. "Confidential, must go today" is the fraudster's favourite sentence. The rule: the more pressure, the slower we go. Now put AI on the right side of this. Paste this into ChatGPT, Claude or Copilot: "Act as an auditor. I run a [type of business] with [number] staff. Payments are approved by [who] using [bank or tool]. Draft a one-page payment verification policy covering callbacks, dual approval, bank detail changes, code phrases and what to do in the first hour if money goes to a fraudster. Use plain English and a checklist format."

In June 2026, expense software company Emburse published a survey of 2,000 workers in the US and UK. Four in ten US employees admitted using AI to generate a fake receipt for a business expense. Of those who did: - 19% used AI to fabricate a purchase entirely - 15% used it to inflate the value of a real one - 40% used AI tools their employer was paying for It is a vendor survey, so treat the exact numbers with care. But the direction is hard to argue with. A convincing receipt now takes seconds, and the old tells, such as odd fonts or a blurry photocopy, are disappearing. I trained in audit at PwC and KPMG. One principle from that world matters more than ever now: evidence from an independent source is more reliable than evidence produced by the person making the claim. A receipt is evidence from the claimant. A card transaction comes from the bank. That difference is now your best control. Five changes any business can make this month, no new software required: 1. Move to company cards where you can. The transaction record is created by the card provider, not the employee. 2. Match receipts to bank or card data, not to how real they look. If you cannot trace it to a transaction, treat it as unverified. 3. Update your policy wording. If it only mentions "altered" receipts, add "AI-generated or digitally fabricated". 4. Never change a supplier's bank details from an email. Call a number you already had on file, not one in the request. 5. Split the jobs. The person who adds a supplier should not be the person who approves the payment. Notice that none of these try to spot the fake by eye. That fight is already lost. The answer is to stop relying on the document and start relying on the source. AI makes forgery cheap. Good controls make it pointless. Which of these five does your business not have yet?

I'm looking for a small number of contributors for my third book, and I'd love to hear from people in this community. The book is The Human-Led, AI-Powered Decade: Foresight for Leaders Who Refuse to Be Surprised by 2036, Book Three in my Human-Led Leadership Series. It helps CEOs, CFOs and boards see the next ten years of work coming and act on it this year. Each contributed chapter, called "Voices from 2036", answers one question: What will your field have stopped doing by 2036, and what should a leader do about it this year? • One dated signal that the change has already started • One forecast that could be proved wrong • One action a leader could take this year You don't need to be a writer. A 30 minute call is enough: I draft the chapter from your own words, and nothing is used without your approval. Every chapter is credited to you by name, with a short bio. To express interest, comment or DM me by Monday 19 October with: 1. Your field 2. Your one-sentence answer to the question I'll review every reply and send the full brief to the people whose angle best fits the book.

Last week I shared the Main Street AI findings from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation and Ipsos. The headline: AI use is everywhere among small businesses, but building it into how the business actually runs is rare. This week I want to show you why closing that gap is about to matter more, and it's not the reason most people think. Two signals from September: On 9 September 2026, Mastercard launched Agent Connect for merchants building agentic commerce. On 10 September 2026, Visa, Mastercard and Ant International announced they've started building a shared "Know Your Agent" framework so payment networks can recognise and trust AI agents that buy on someone's behalf. Put simply: the card networks are preparing for AI agents to shop, book and pay. That means two kinds of agents will touch your business. There are the ones you run, and the ones your customers send. Most small business AI advice only covers the first kind. Here are three things to do this quarter that cover both: 1. Make your business readable to agents Prices, availability, opening hours, booking rules and refund policy should all be in plain text on your website, not buried in images or PDFs. An agent can't book what it can't read. 2. Integrate one workflow properly Don't add AI to ten things. Pick one workflow that's frequent, rule-based and easy to reverse, then build it end to end with a named owner and a log of what it did. That's the jump from "using AI" to "running on AI". Fahad's point this week is right too: not every automation needs AI. Start with the workflow, not the tool. 3. Decide your rules for agent customers now What can an agent book or buy without a human on your side? What needs a confirmation? How do you handle a refund request from an agent? Write it down before the first one arrives. My forecast, stated so it can be proved wrong: by the end of 2028, major small business surveys like Main Street AI will be asking how many customers buy through AI agents, not just how many owners use AI. If the 2028 edition doesn't ask, I was wrong.

follow these instructions to get started: ✅ Step 1: Go to the 'Classroom' section & open the 'Start Here' course. ✅ Step 2: Open the 'Start here' module & start watching. ✅ Step 3: Everything will be explained from there on! See y'all in the modules! Next Steps ➡️ - If you're brand new to AI & Claude, start with the new Cowork 101 Course 🦾 - If you're comfortable with Claude and looking for a setup that's a little more advanced, start with the AI Second Brain 2.0 Course 🔥 - If you're ready to create INSANELY valuable automations using AI to compltely transform businesses, go to the AI Automations Course (For Businesses) 💻💸 Work with me 🤝 - 🦾 If you're a business owner who'd like to hire me & my team of engineers to build automations/software/AI agents for you, go here: https://www.seven80labs.com/ - 👥 If you'd like my 1-1 consulting to help you learn how to implement AI in your business, book a demo call here: https://cal.com/1-1-ai-consulting - 👾 If you want to check out SGNL (the web app I'm developing w/ my team) you can try it out for free for 7-days here: https://www.sgnl.so/