Nathaniel Whittemore

Think back a few years ago to when the Titan submersible imploded.

In the Los Angeles Times, Jessica Gelt wrote a piece, as those aboard the Titan submersible suffered, social media laughed.

She writes, Gleeful best describes the tenor of many posts, which include making fun of the video game controller used to pilot the Titan, laughing at the billionaires inside the submersible, jokes about the effects of lack of oxygen on the human psyche, or substituting fart sounds for the knocking sounds that rescuers apparently heard underwater.

We saw a similar type of glee from some places in the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, although the debate there quickly turned to whether people could be fired for expressing those views on social media.

Still, maybe the most obvious example of this

is Gen Z turning Luigi Mangione, the accused assassin of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, into some kind of folk hero.

According to an Emerson poll that was conducted in the same month after that crime, 41% of 18 to 29-year-olds in the US agreed that it was somewhat or completely acceptable to kill a CEO.

Now, when it comes to AI specifically, people have been worried about this for some time now.

counterterrorism think tank, the Sufjan Center, which is a respected counterterrorism think tank, published an assessment in November of last year titled, As Data Centers Proliferate, Anti-AI Resistance Has the Potential to Turn Violent.

The research documented a spike in online threats against AI infrastructure since early 2024.

And while the attacks on Sam Altman seem to be about bigger AI safety considerations than just AI data centers, they weren't the only political violence we got last week.

Four days before Altman's attack, Indianapolis City Councilman Ron Gibson had 13 rounds fired at his front door, with a note reading no data centers left under his doormat.

All right, folks, quick pause.

Here's the uncomfortable truth.

If your enterprise AI strategy is we bought some tools, you don't actually have a strategy.

KPMG took the harder route and became their own client zero.

They embedded AI and agents across the enterprise, how work gets done, how teams collaborate, how decisions move, not as a tech initiative, but as a total operating model shift.

And here's the real unlock.

That shift raised the ceiling on what people could do.

Humans stayed firmly at the center while AI reduced friction, surfaced insight, and accelerated momentum.