Welcome back to Week Two, Episode 2.

Since this is (purposely) not hitting the public yet, I feel like this.

I was in a peer group last week discussing many aspects of compliance and risk identification and mitigation, especially around agency offshore hiring. I was learning a lot about the details, laws, recent changes, and what to watch out for in markets all across the global that seemed common knowledge for some of these more veteran leaders.

Even if I’ve done nothing wrong, anything in business with legal ramifications tends to freak me out.

This got me thinking about Risk - and especially how I think risk factoring has changed dramatically in 2026.

In most business and industrial settings, Risk is usually calculated as some product of Severity and Likelihood. They work in tandem - as severity & likelihood go up, the potential risk goes up and vice versa. Most companies have their own custom scales that quantitatively rank certain Severity and Likelihood scenarios. The resulting “score” of the product is the overall risk, and companies can prioritize accordingly.

In this new AI-enabled age, though, Likelihood is so much more important in risk factoring than it ever has been. And I’m not sure it’s being factored in accordingly.

The specific scenario I’m thinking of here is compliance. Traditionally, “bending and breaking the rules” in business (and life) has been a poorly-kept secret piece of advice for entrepreneurs, if not outwardly encouraged. I’ve seen this up close and personally in my career, and rarely have I been impressed by those who subscribe to that thinking.

There are many reasons this advice is given. The optimistic reasons are that it promotes “outside the box” thinking, encourages action in the midst of ambiguity, and pushes the limits of what’s currently possible from creativity.

The pessimistic reason? Nobody was watching. The powers-that-be, especially for compliance, literally don’t have the resources to come after you. While the Severity might be high, if you aren’t egregious, the Likelihood was so so low. Governments, the IRS (and foreign equivalents) and 3rd party litigators just have bigger fish to fry.

To paint this picture: If you commit some heinous crime in Country A (please don’t), but flee to your native Country B in time, with no extradition in place, it’s not all that likely that someone can or will come after you for it. The resources are not available, and the return is not worth it in many cases. The severity doesn’t really matter because the likelihood is low.

But if you drive 9 over in a 30 next to the police station, you’re probably getting pulled over. God forbid your seatbelt is off.

Putting the dramatization of this aside, what’s insane to me (and probably most others who feel they’re ethical) is that the second scenario guy actually pays a penalty, while the first person got off scot-free (with maybe some guilt, hopefully some nightmares, and zero chance of returning to Country A). We see versions of this everywhere. It’s not about right versus wrong, it’s about whether or not some figurative (or literal) border location is policed & resourced. How is that fair or just?

Fast-forward to 2030. AI has been around and likely advented (new word I made up, it’s my newsletter, deal with it) in most organizations for several years. These traditionally resource-limited compliance agencies have just multiplied (if not exponentiated) their capabilities from targeted AI. And the US government, which, as you may know, spends money at an alarming rate, has likely continued to grow - putting more pressure on the politicians and bureaucrats to enforce laws (or create new ones) to maximize revenue.

Here are some plausible examples of “resource & capability exponentiators” for famously-strained enforcement offices that I thought of literally off the top of my head. And if I can think of it, it’s probably already in production:

You can fill in the latency on how AI plugs the rest of the gaps of the process. Overnight, these agencies can do more and accomplish more than they ever could. They can likely go after the “heinous crime” guy, and they almost certainly catch the person going 9 over.

Like any hot take prediction, there are plenty of massive implications and Jevons Paradoxes in these scenarios that I’m not accounting for. Counting on worldwide governments and enforcement entities to operate efficiently and potently has not often been a good bet. The smart people who bend the rules will also find new ways to evade the rules and the enforcement. And is every rule actually worth policing, even with exponentially more resources? I’m no philosopher, but my guess is certainly not.

The point is that for the average person, thorough ethics at every level of your life will become not just what helps you sleep at night, but a mandatory quality to ‘stay in the game’. Breaking the rules is about to become a lot harder for the average person.

Not exactly the soundtrack of my week, just songs I want to get stuck in your head.

Sincerely,

Zander Barth