The AI Paradox of 2025: Leadership, Risk & Strategy in an Accelerating Era

What if while you’re figuring out how to use AI to boost productivity, someone else is using it to breach your systems?

AI is now both your biggest business accelerator—and your biggest risk. While leaders are exploring how to use AI for productivity and automation, cybercriminals are already weaponising it to scan 50,000 companies at once.

This is the AI paradox of 2025: the same technology that powers growth can also expose your organisation to unprecedented threats.

That’s why I’ve brought together two voices who sit on opposite sides of the AI landscape for a leadership-level conversation on what it really means to lead through this transformation.

Two Sides of the AI Coin: Strategy and Security

Dr. Ayesha Khanna is our thoughtful guide to AI’s strategic potential. As co-founder and CEO of ADDO AI (recognised by Forbes as one of Asia’s top AI companies), she’s spent two decades showing organisations how to amplify human potential through intelligent automation.

Bastien Treptel is our canary in the AI cyber mine. Having breached the cybersecurity defences of one of Australia’s big four banks at 16, he now works as an ethical hacker, helping CEOs identify their vulnerabilities and risks and defend against them.

Combined, their insights help us explore AI’s role as both a is key to unleashing capability and a lock to warding off the new threat landscape the technology itself is unleashing—and why every leader needs both the offensive strategy and the defensive playbook to navigate what’s coming next.

Watch: The AI Paradox Conversation

Watch the whole conversation below, and scroll on for the key highlights and takeaways.

What I Can’t Stop Thinking About

Two insights from this conversation have stuck with me—not because they’re theoretical future risks, but because they’re happening right now:

  1. AI-Powered Attacks Are Already Here

    AI isn’t just helping hackers—it’s industrialising them on a scale never before seen. As Bastien explained:

    “AI can do 50,000 vulnerability scans at the same time. What used to take me scanning IP addresses one by one—maybe four or five at a time—AI now does across entire industries simultaneously. It creates a screen showing company names with green dots saying ‘this company is vulnerable to this specific attack.'”

    Think of it this way: What used to be like a burglar checking door handles one house at a time is now like having X-ray vision to instantly see which houses in entire neighborhoods have unlocked doors, broken windows, or faulty alarm systems.

    AI doesn’t just find vulnerabilities faster. It creates a real-time treasure map for cybercriminals—showing exactly which companies are easy targets and how to break in.

    We’re not just playing on an uneven field—the entire game has changed. And cybercriminals are playing the long game:

    “There’s a hacking organisation in Southeast Asia with 180 staff. They’re clearing $7 million USD in profit per week,” Bastien said. “They’re developing AI tools but holding them back. When the traditional hacks stop working, they’ll unleash the next wave.”

    In other words, while we’re still catching up to today’s cyber threats, criminal organisations are already building tomorrow’s weapons.

    2. AI Team Members Are Already Redefining Business Models

    Ayesha offered a powerful window into what smart AI integration looks like. She’s already reimagined the workforce with AI team members playing active roles across her business.

    “I give them different roles depending on what they’re doing – marketing, HR, legal, whatever.”

    Each assistant is prompted and configured to handle a specific function—whether that’s coding, researching content, reviewing contracts, or helping shape marketing strategy. But humans are still firmly in charge of what matters most.

    “AI gives the first draft. Our job is to bring the insight,” Ayesha explained. 

    But here’s where it gets even more transformative: AI agents are now beginning to talk to each other. As Ayesha shared, agentic AI is emerging as a game-changer:

    “Imagine if a legal AI can speak to a sales AI, which can speak to a logistics AI—they’ll be able to share information, hand off actions, and coordinate work. Picture a manager AI orchestrating it all, planning and assigning tasks across them.”

    Ayesha was clear: that’s the moment when you see how fast this will accelerate.

    “It’s becoming cheaper, faster, smarter—and now, able to talk to each other. It’s a no-brainer that AI will proliferate into every sector and transform it fundamentally. And right now? We’re just at the beginning of that hockey stick.”

What This Means for Leaders—Right Now

Here’s the stark reality this conversation revealed: We’re living through the fastest transformation of risk and opportunity in business history.

While criminals invest millions in AI-powered attack tools and innovators reshape entire business models with AI teammates, the middle ground is disappearing fast. You’re either learning to harness AI’s power or you’re becoming vulnerable to those who already have.

As Bastien bluntly warned: “If you’re not playing with AI in your business, you’re going to be overtaken. Most medium to small organisations that don’t adopt AI won’t be here in 12 to 24 months.”

Dr. Khanna’s Framework for Leading AI Transformation

AI doesn’t transform businesses. Leaders do.

That’s the message behind Dr. Ayesha Khanna’s practical framework for successful AI integration. In our conversation, she outlined three pillars every leader needs to prioritise—not just to implement AI, but to do so in a way that actually delivers results.

  1. Start With Strategy, Not Tools

    “Over 80% of AI pilots stay in what I call ‘pilot purgatory’—they never scale because companies haven’t thought through their business goals first. You need to reverse engineer from your customer goals, not start with cool technology.”

    Ayesha’s point here is simple but powerful: if you haven’t defined what value looks like, AI won’t deliver it.

    Before you start picking tools, get crystal clear on what you’re solving for.
    What is the “value” AI can help your business unlock? Is it shorter customer wait times? Smarter product recommendations? A smoother onboarding experience?

    Start there. Nail the outcome first. Then ask: how can AI help us get there faster, better, or more intelligently?
  2. Build The Room First, Not the Whole House

     “It’s like building a house—you don’t need to complete the whole house before moving in. You build a foundation, then create the first room while continuing construction.”

    Too many AI strategies stall because leaders fall into the trap of trying to build the entire house before they move in—every system integrated, every department on board, every edge case accounted for.

    Ayesha’s advice? Don’t wait for perfection. Build one room you can live in—and start from there.

    That “first room” might be a single use case: one business unit, one process, one workflow. But it’s built on a strong foundation: clean, usable data, reliable infrastructure, cybersecurity protocols, and skilled talent. Without it, your pilot won’t scale—just like running a marathon without training.

    Start small—but smart. Use that first room to learn, test, and prove value. Then build the rest of the house with more clarity, confidence, and momentum.
  3. Start With People, Not Platforms

    “The true criteria for success isn’t delivering an AI solution—it’s adoption.”

    Even the most sophisticated AI tools are useless if no one uses them.

    Ayesha emphasises change management as the real benchmark of success. Whether it’s a legal AI assistant or a predictive healthcare model, if employees or customers don’t trust or engage with the solution, the initiative will stall.

    Embedding AI into existing workflows—and supporting people through the transition—is essential.

Bastien’s Cybersecurity Playbook for Leaders

Former black hat hacker Bastien Treptel doesn’t mince words: most companies are dangerously underprepared—and AI just widened the attack surface. His advice? Don’t wait for the perfect cybersecurity strategy. Start with the basics—and scale smart from there.

The Absolute Basics (Do These Now)

  1. Use complex, unique passwords (stored in a manager like 1Password or Bitwarden)
  2. Always enable two-factor authentication (2FA). Use an authentication app (like Google Authenticator or Authy)—not SMS, which is easier to intercept through SIM-swapping attacks.
  3. Patch your systems regularly—ideally weekly. Set up automatic updates where possible, and assign clear ownership for manual patching.

“If you just did these three things across the board,” Bastien said, “you’d eliminate most vulnerabilities.”

AI Cybersecurity Is a Different Beast

Whether it’s an internal department or an external partner, you need someone who understands the game you’re playing—and how fast it’s moving. Bastien recommends working with experts to monitor and harden your defences. 

But he’s clear: that’s no excuse to check out: “Even with expert help, leaders can’t outsource responsibility for cybersecurity culture and basic hygiene.”

This was echoed by Ayesha, who flagged a growing blind spot: Cybersecurity for AI is fundamentally different from your traditional IT help desk support. With over 150 known ways to compromise an AI system—from data poisoning to prompt injection—traditional defences just aren’t enough.

AI might be a game changer—but without strong security foundations and ongoing vigilance, it’s a high-stakes liability.

Leadership at the Intersection of Power and Peril

Here’s the thing about AI: It’s not inherently good or evil. It’s a massive amplifier that makes your strengths stronger and your weaknesses more dangerous.

That’s why this isn’t a technology challenge—it’s a leadership challenge.

The leaders who get this right won’t just be adopting AI, they’ll be shaping how it integrates with their culture, their values, and their vision. They’ll move fast enough to stay competitive but thoughtfully enough to avoid becoming casualties.

AI will amplify your leadership and culture, for better or worse. The question isn’t whether you’re ready for AI—it’s whether your leadership is ready for what AI will reveal about your organisation.

Resources For Continued Learning

From the Experts

To keep your finger on the AI pulse, Dr. Ayesha Khanna recommends:

Dr. Khanna’s top 5 AI tools:

  • Claude: For strategic thinking and analysis
  • Perplexity: For research and fact-checking (her top pick – “hands down the best tool”)
  • ChatGPT: For general business tasks
  • Gemini: For specific Google-integrated workflows
  • DeepSeek: For cost-effective processing

⚠️ A quick word of caution: These tools are powerful—but use them responsibly. Before diving in, set up private accounts, review data-sharing settings, and avoid entering sensitive info unless you’re on an enterprise-grade plan with proper safeguards.

To keep your finger on the cybersecurity pulse Bastien Treptel recommends:

  • Ground News (politically neutral, AI-powered news aggregation)
  • YouTube channels focused on ethical hacking and AI security
  • The “AI 2027” report for future scenario planning
  • The Essential Eight a set of 8 key cybersecurity strategies developed by the Australian Signals Directorate to help organisations protect their IT networks from cyber threats.

From Me

Some of my recent articles you might find helpful as you lead your team through this transformation:

If this helped you, I’d be truly grateful if you passed it on to someone else making sense of AI in 2025.