Blog

01 Annotation

Wharton's April 2026 analysis of the McKinsey Lilli incident is the clearest published case study to date of the failure pattern we describe in our whitepaper The Agentic Blast Radius. Every one of the five control gaps is visible in the incident timeline. The attacker did not need a human insider. An autonomous offensive agent ran reconnaissance, discovered 22 unauthenticated API endpoints, identified the SQL injection path, and exfiltrated the database in under two hours. That is the Gap 5 scenario made concrete: a compromise that propagates faster than any conventional SOC escalation path can respond to it. The 46.5 million chat messages were not primary data. They were the memory layer of a GenAI platform: the accumulated conversational residue of tens of thousands of consultants working on strategy, M&A, and client engagements. Most organisations classify their CRM, their document management system, and their email archive as sensitive. Very few classify their agent memory, their vector stores, or their conversation logs with the same rigour. The unauthenticated API endpoints are the Gap 2 scenario: permission architecture scoped for the broadest possible task, not the narrowest current one. And the absence of a behavioural kill switch that could have terminated anomalous query patterns against the production database is Gap 5 in its operational form. The lesson is not that McKinsey got it uniquely wrong. The lesson is that the failure pattern (over-privileged agents, ungoverned memory, no machine-speed response capability) is the default pattern in most enterprise agentic deployments right now.

Maps to: Gaps 2, 4 & 5: Excessive Agency, Sanctioned Leakage (memory layer), Non-Human Identity

01 Annotation

EY's March 2026 Technology Pulse Poll quantifies what we describe in our whitepaper as the Governance Gap: over half of department-level AI initiatives are running without formal oversight, and 78% of leaders admit adoption has outpaced risk management. Most telling: 45% report confirmed or suspected data leaks from unauthorised AI tools in the past year alone. The "velocity paradox" EY identifies (the tension between speed-to-market and accountability) is precisely why we argue governance must precede deployment, not follow it.

Maps to: Traps 1, 2 & 4: Shadow AI, Sanctioned Leakage, Governance Gap

01 Annotation

Speaking at the Gartner Data & Analytics Summit this month, Deloitte's AI Institute head Beena Ammanath put it plainly: enterprises are caught between pressure from leadership to show AI value and foundations that aren't ready. Her two blockers (data readiness and governance) mirror what we identify as the Governance Gap and the Skills Illusion. As she notes: without the right governance model, trust never forms, and adoption stalls. That is the trap. Not the technology; the organisational discipline around it.

Maps to: Traps 4 & 5: Governance Gap, Skills Illusion