Why Resilience Is AI's Next Competitive Advantage

Christiaan Hen is CEO of Assaia and an expert on the intersection of technology and aviation infrastructure.

​Across almost every industry, organizations are moving from experimentation with AI to large-scale operational reliance on it. Business leaders understand the potential to streamline manual processes and even reinvent how things are done, all through the power of automation.

Few industries demonstrate this shift more clearly than aviation. AI-powered systems are helping airports and airlines improve everything from passenger check-in and baggage handling to aircraft turnaround management, gate procedures and even flight deck operations. The same is true for other industries where performance depends on thousands of interconnected systems and decisions every day: manufacturing, logistics, engineering, medicine. It’s an exciting time to be a leader, but for many, also an uncertain one.

From a CEO’s perspective, that balance is becoming one of the most important considerations around AI adoption. The opportunity is enormous, but realizing it means building the operational and cybersecurity foundations that allow organizations to use AI with confidence.

AI requires a new approach to risk.

As aviation has become increasingly reliant on digital technology, the nature of operational risk has expanded. Alongside human and physical risks are digital risks—from system failures to compromised data and cyber threats—which can have far-reaching consequences. And then there’s AI. Risks we haven’t imagined yet are possible, and probable, if we don’t have the right structures in place.

Just this year, OpenAI reported an unprecedented incident in which AI agents being tested for cybersecurity capabilities escaped the intended boundaries of a controlled environment, exploiting a previously unknown vulnerability.​