Saturday, September 5th, 2026
Every party to a sea voyage can transfer the risk of a closing chokepoint to somebody else. Owners insure hulls, charterers hedge freight, underwriters lay it off again. The crew is the one link in the chain with no market to sell its exposure into.
Organisations deployed systems that produce work product and left unresolved who is answerable for it. The question arrives with the first consequential error.
Procurement can name every direct supplier and almost none of their suppliers. The shortages that halt production keep arriving from that second layer, where nobody was looking.
Mid-sized companies that spent years absorbing premium increases are forming captive insurers to keep the money in-house. It works, until the year it is tested.
Companies have always known their software sits on components maintained by volunteers. Insurers, auditors and regulators are now asking which ones, who maintains them, and what happens when that person stops.
Enterprises spent a year making sure they could switch between model providers. The switch turns out to run through a small number of clouds, chips and inference platforms that no procurement policy addressed.
Companies that ignored security consultants for years are now doing exactly what their insurance carriers demand, because the alternative is being uninsurable.
Deployment has run well ahead of measurement. A striking number of production systems have no defensible answer to whether they are performing better than what they replaced.
Broad market index funds have become substantially less diversified than the word index implies. Institutional allocators are reworking mandates written when the assumption held.
Companies built production systems on models that vendors retire on their own schedule. The resulting migrations are unplanned, unbudgeted and increasingly frequent.