Top 10 Leadership and Management links of the week, curated by Corix Partners Founder and CEO JC Gaillard, focusing on cyber security of course, but also a large cross section of subjects including digital transformation, emerging tech, AI governance and the future of work.

This Week >> More spending, more AI, more transformation — but where is the value?

- Cyber budgets are rising, but AI-driven threats are moving faster
- Cyber resilience still struggles with organizational barriers
- CISO pressure is becoming a leadership problem in its own right
- Digital transformation continues to stumble on execution
- Scaling AI requires new management disciplines & architectures
- ROI remains elusive despite accelerating investment
- And AI productivity gains may be creating tomorrow’s talent problem

The common thread? Investment and adoption are racing ahead of organizational capability. The next competitive advantage will come from turning technology spend into measurable, sustainable business outcomes.

 

Cybersecurity Budgets Are Growing Fast. AI Threats Are Growing Faster.

Rising cybersecurity budgets are struggling to keep pace with AI’s expansion of both the attack surface and security mandate, making stronger AI governance and prioritization as important as additional spending.

https://www.bcg.com/publications/2026/cybersecurity-spending-ai-threat-trends

 

Why cyber resilience fails: 5 obstacles holding orgs back

Cyber resilience breaks down when strategy meets operational reality, with skills shortages, technical debt, third-party dependencies, identity sprawl, and insufficient testing preventing organizations from turning plans into genuine resilience.

https://www.techtarget.com/cybersecurity/tip/Why-cyber-resilience-fails-obstacles-holding-orgs-back

 

50% of CISOs see Mythos as a sign to exit the profession

Rapid advances in frontier AI are intensifying an already unsustainable CISO accountability problem, with expanding responsibility and personal liability too often unmatched by sufficient authority and organizational alignment.

https://www.csoonline.com/article/4218857/50-of-cisos-see-mythos-as-a-sign-to-exit-the-profession.html

 

Why digital transformations still fail

Digital transformations continue to disappoint because organizations too often put technology and standardized transformation programs ahead of clearly defined business problems, organizational realities, and execution.

https://www.infoworld.com/article/4217575/why-digital-transformations-still-fail.html

 

From tokenmaxxing to valuemaxxing

Enterprise AI needs to move beyond maximizing usage and token consumption toward disciplined deployment that connects AI activity with measurable productivity and business value.

https://www.itpro.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/from-tokenmaxxing-to-valuemaxxing

 

The new management playbook for AI: How to move faster and create more value

Sustainable AI advantage comes not from access to technology but from building the leadership, talent, operating-model, data, and technology capabilities needed to repeatedly turn AI into business value at scale.

https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/tech-and-ai/our-insights/the-new-management-playbook-for-ai-how-to-move-faster-and-create-more-value

 

From pilots to production: AI architecture that scales

Moving agentic AI from successful pilots into production requires an enterprise architecture capable of integrating agents, data, governance, security, and human oversight across end-to-end workflows.

https://www.pwc.com/us/en/intelligent-enterprise/scaling-the-agentic-enterprise.html

 

The state of AI in 2026: On the road to ROI

AI adoption and agentic deployment are accelerating—particularly in large enterprises—but most organizations are still working out how to convert widespread usage and individual productivity gains into measurable enterprise-level returns.

https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights/the-state-of-ai

 

Companies are spending millions rewiring how AI gets used. Almost none can prove it's working.

Organizations are investing heavily in AI adoption and redesigning how employees work, but soaring usage and token consumption remain poor proxies for whether those investments are actually improving business outcomes.

https://venturebeat.com/ai/companies-are-spending-millions-rewiring-how-ai-gets-used-almost-none-can-prove-its-working

 

Your AI Productivity Gains Are Creating a Talent Crisis

AI-driven productivity can create a long-term talent problem if automating junior-level work removes the experience, learning, and development pathways through which organizations traditionally build their future experts and leaders.

https://hackernoon.com/your-ai-productivity-gains-are-creating-a-talent-crisis

 

Contact Corix Partners to find out more about developing a successful Cyber Security Practice for your business.

Corix Partners is a Boutique Management Consultancy Firm and Thought-Leadership Platform, focused on assisting CIOs and other C-level executives in resolving Cyber Security Strategy, Organisation & Governance challenges.

Our Founder and CEO JC Gaillard is is a leading strategic advisor and a globally-recognised cybersecurity thought-leader with over 25 years of experience developed in several financial institutions in the UK and continental Europe, and a track-record at driving fundamental change in the security field across global organisations, looking beyond the technical horizon into strategy, governance, culture, and the real dynamics of business transformation.

He is the author of:

• “Cyber Security: The Lost Decade – A Security Governance Handbook for the CISO and the CIO” first published in September 2017 with updated annual editions released every year up to 2021;
• “The CyberSecurity Leadership Handbook for the CISO and the CEO” first released on Amazon in February 2023 (updated edition released in July 2024);
• “The Cybersecurity Spiral of Failure” released on Amazon in January 2024, and
• “The First 100 Days of the New CISO” released on Amazon in November 2025

By Jean-Christophe Gaillard

Keywords: Cybersecurity, GRC, Leadership

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