Who has the right to govern Mars or the Moon?
Kelly Weinersmith, author of “A City on Mars,” speaks with CNBC’s Morgan Brennan at the 2026 CNBC Technology Executive Council Summit in New York City on October 28, 2026
CNBC
Multiple companies, billionaires and nations are all in a race to reach the next phase of space exploration, much of which is focused on the idea of colonizing, or at least setting up permanent bases, beyond Earth.
But what sort of rules would govern those off-planet efforts?
Kelly Weinersmith, author of the 2023 book A City on Mars, told CNBC’s Morgan Brennan at the 2026 Technology Executive Council Summit that as it relates to Mars, the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, created by the United Nations, is the foundation of international space law.
That treaty states that outer space and all celestial bodies must be used exclusively for peaceful purposes, and that they cannot be claimed or owned by any nation through sovereignty, use, occupation or other means. The treaty also established the right of all nations to freely explore and use outer space.
“When the U.S. landed on the moon and we put up our American flag, we weren’t saying this belongs to us; we were just having a patriotic moment,” Weinersmith said.
However, it does raise the question of how can you extract and sell resources in space if you can’t claim any of the land that you’re either mining or living on?
Weinersmith said the 2020 Artemis Accords, a set of non-binding principles established by NASA, the U.S. State Department and seven other nations including Canada, Japan and the U.K., specified that the interpretation of that UN treaty was that “you don’t need to have sovereignty to extract and sell resources.”
While Weinersmith noted other countries have since agreed to the Artemis Accords, that group does not include China or Russia.
“What we’ve got seems to be the setup for a scramble for territory on the moon,” she said.
— Ian Thomas
The problem with Elon Musk’s plan to have people live on Mars by 2055
Elon Musk has long set his sights on putting humans on Mars, and now he has an additional financial incentive to make it happen: his recently disclosed SpaceX CEO performance incentive plan has an award agreement centered on “establishing a permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants,” a milestone that is tied to Musk receiving upwards of 1.3 billion shares of the company.
Musk has stated that humans will live on Mars by 2055, but Kelly Weinersmith, author of the 2023 book A City on Mars, told CNBC’s Morgan Brennan at the 2026 Technology Executive Council Summit that even if a Mars colony happens in our lifetime, “it might be catastrophic.”
“One of the arguments we make in the book is that it will probably take about that long just for us to make sure that human bodies could survive on Mars and that women could survive pregnancy and labor on Mars,” she said. “While we have about 50 years’ worth of data about human bodies in space, we don’t actually have a lot of data that’s relevant to Mars or relevant to reproduction.”
“I think we should slow down,” Weinersmith said.
Weinersmith said that while NASA has long been compiling data about what happens to astronauts’ bodies while they spend time in space, there are obvious limitations to that data set. On top of that, the implications of Mars’ gravity and other factors on human bodies is far from understood.
“The data suggests there’s plenty of reasons to worry, and I’m not seeing a lot of investment to do the kind of experiments we would need to know,” she said. “I don’t know if there’s enough money going towards that that we will have all the answers we need in the next 20 to 30 years because biology experiments are notoriously slow.”
— Ian Thomas
The governance steps to rein in AI agents
Daniel Dobrygowski, Sophos Global Counsel, AI and Cybersecurity, speaks at the 2026 CNBC Technology Executive Council Summit in New York City on October 28, 2026
CNBC
The situation that led XMTP Labs CEO Shane Mac to have an AI agent post his financial information on a company Slack channel may be a story he laughs about now, but it’s also a reflection of just how things can go wrong with AI agents.
“It shows just how many decisions you need to make right in order for agents to do the right thing and not end up seeming like they’re going rogue,” Daniel Dobrygowski, Sophos Global Counsel, AI and Cybersecurity, told CNBC’s Jon Fortt at the 2026 CNBC Technology Executive Council Summit.
Dobrygowski said he doesn’t consider what Mac’s AI agent did to be going rogue. In fact, he said, this is a situation of “not setting up the guardrails properly.”
“It might be a little mistake. It might be ambiguous instruction,” he said. “But you don’t have that kind of runway to make those mistakes if you’re in a regulated industry, so you have to get those decisions right at the beginning.”
Carving out those guardrails is a critical part of making sure AI agents, and other forms of AI automation, “can move forward and do useful things, but not veer off and end up causing problems,” Dobrygowski said.
Dobrygowski offered TEC members a few governance tips:
Define what the parameters are
Take that a step further and define what can and won’t mean
Think about what can go wrong, and plan for what the worst thing that can happen is
“This is where governance needs strategy,” he said. “What are you using this technology for? What is it good for? You need to make a decision about that, and that’s where you have the trade-offs between what is the safest, what is the most viable, and what makes the most sense.”
— Ian Thomas
What happens when an AI agent posts your financial information in your company’s Slack channel
Shane Mac, CEO of the software developer XMTP Labs, had been using AI agents to perform tasks both for his personal and professional life.
What he didn’t expect to happen was for one of the agents to post his bank account information in a company Slack channel.
Mac said that one day, he received a screenshot from the company’s head of product of a Slack message that detailed all of Mac’s financial information posted by an AI agent.
But, while concerns over AI agents going rogue have grown, Mac said this situation was a case of thinking “it was doing what it thought it should do.”
“Everybody loves the train wreck,” Mac told CNBC’s Jon Fortt. “I’m only here because I crashed the train.”
— Ian Thomas
The ‘Black October’ cybersecurity crisis will likely compound: Cisco’s Jeetu Patel
Cisco President & Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel speaks at the 2026 CNBC Technology Executive Council Summit in New York City on October 28, 2026
CNBC
AI agents are intelligent and resourceful, but they lack fear of consequences, Cisco President and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel told CNBC contributor Alex Kantrowitz at the 2026 CNBC Technology Executive Council Summit.
Kantrowitz asked Patel about “Black October,” which is the name the security community has given to the amount of cybersecurity vulnerabilities found over the past month.
“I think firstly, you won’t just have a ‘Black October.’ You’re going to have a ‘Black November.’ You’re going to have a ‘Black December’ because it’s just going to continue to keep compounding,” Patel told Kantrowitz.
It’s going to get progressively harder, Patel said, to distinguish between an adversarial attack on an agent from a bad actor or an agent exercising poor judgment.
“Your security telemetry and your observability telemetry cannot be in two separate data silos … you will have to unify your telemetry because the assumption you have to make is the agent has already infiltrated your environment,” Patel said.
“You have to prevent it at the policy layer. You have to prevent it at the at the application layer. You have to prevent it at every layer of the stack,” he added.
— Colleen McKown
Will AI agents have an “iPhone moment”? 
As a society, we do not fully trust AI yet. For instance, most people are not giving AI access to their credit cards.
“There’s something inside you that says, ‘I can’t trust this bot to not make purchases I don’t want it to make,'” CNBC contributor Alex Kantrowitz said in a conversation on AI safety with Cisco President and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel.
“I think if you look at society at large, the trust gap is pretty high right now. People don’t trust these things to be able to use them, and for good reason,” Patel said.
“I think we have to make sure that we get better at being able to constantly be able to monitor agent behavior, and then be able to intercept at runtime when agents are starting to show drift from human values and is misaligned with human values,” he said.
Patel said he thinks there will be “meaningful progress” on this front over the next three to six months and predicts that personal agents will create a “catalytic moment, and it’s going to happen sooner than you think.”
“I think it’ll be like the iPhone,” he said, saying that his breakthrough in thinking came when an AI agent saved him $1,000 a year in subscriptions.
“That was the unlock for me. And so I do feel like there’s an iPhone moment,” Patel said.
— Colleen McKown
Keeping taste and judgment once AI is involved in creative decisions
Jason Gowans, Levi Strauss Chief Digital & Technology Officer, speaks with CNBC’s Jon Fortt at the 2026 CNBC Technology Executive Council Summit in New York City on October 28, 2026.
CNBC
Over the last year, Levi Strauss has deployed Stitch, an AI-powered super assistant designed to help store employees answer any question a customer may have as they shop for jeans or other items.
So as Levi’s put this tool into the hands of thousands of workers across the globe, did it put as much effort into training workers to use it as it did to develop it?
Levi Strauss Chief Digital & Technology Officer Jason Gowans said at the core of the company is a belief in “judgement and creativity,” creating a “very fine line” when introducing a tool that is designed to increase productivity and efficiency while keeping that level of taste.
“The way we approach that from a training point of view is that we think about mindset, skill set and toolset,” Gowans said.
An example of that, Gowans said, would be the concept of slow AI, which means to be “really intentional about when you get an output from AI, asking yourself what assumptions went into this output, where might there be biases, what evidence is missing from that answer?”
Gowans said a recent poll of employees suggested that the two things they most want to be trained in are critical thinking and strategic thinking.
“These are examples where we’re teaching strategy formulation. We’re teaching how to make decisions more effectively. That’s firmly in the skill set side of the bucket,” he said.
— Ian Thomas
How AI is helping Levi’s sell jeans
AI is significantly changing the shopping experience, from product discovery to virtual fitting rooms. So, will an AI agent help you buy your next pair of jeans?
While Levi Strauss Chief Digital & Technology Officer Jason Gowans told CNBC’s Jon Fortt that he doesn’t see AI agents doing that — “Maybe for some people, but I think buying denim is a fundamentally emotional experience,” Gowans said — AI is informing how Levi’s is improving the customer experience.
Last year, Levi’s launched Stitch, an AI-powered tool for store staff, providing them with access to product details, inventory information, and operational information, all designed so that workers will always have an answer to a customer question.
“If you think about the world of denim, there are a lot of fits, there are a lot of questions around the type of denim,” Gowans said. “But for a salesperson or a stylist, you may not know this, or you may not have the confidence yet to talk about these products … Stitch was a very simple idea, which was: how do I help every stylist be a world-class stylist and explain our products, and at the same time, minimize all the friction of the back of the house.”
Gowans said that Levi’s business is roughly 50% wholesale and 50% direct-to-consumer, and there is an “obsession about the customer experience” at the company to ensure shoppers are always satisfied.
When Stitch was rolled out, Gowans said it led to an eight-basis-point improvement in customer satisfaction in stores where it was being utilized.
“I’ve worked in retail for a very long time, and usually you’re optimizing at the margins,” he said. “So when you see an eight-point jump in customer satisfaction, where typically you might see a two- or three-point movement in a given year, that shows promise, and we want to lean in.”
— Ian Thomas
Is there an entry-level AI usage paradox?
ADT Product Life Cycle Analyst Jemima Gay speaks with Sharon Epperson at CNBC’s Technology Executive Council Summit on October 28, 2026 in New York City
CNBC
Many company leaders have been relying on entry-level employees coming in and being AI-literate. A CNBC Technology Executive Council Summit attendee asked early-level career professionals if they are seeing this among their teammates and how they have navigated the dichotomy with the education system generally trying to keep AI out.
“In school you’re not learning how to use AI for business, so it’s up to you to figure out the skills that you need to be AI fluent,” said ADT Product Life Cycle Analyst Jemima Gay, who just graduated five months ago. “The companies are looking for entry-level workers, but more ‘seniorized’ skills, which you’re not going to come out of school with.”
Becoming AI fluent, Gay said, is something that workers need to spend a lot of time focusing on.
“I feel that unless you’re in the tech space, you’re not really building those skills as much as you should … that’s the contradiction there,” she said.
Gay is also planning on going to graduate school to further study computer science. Epperson asked why she is choosing this path when AI is likely to take over many computer science jobs.
“I think that the work that we’re doing now is not going to be replaced by AI; I definitely think AI is something that we’re going to be working alongside,” Gay said.
At the same time, Gay said, she is worried about the reduction in entry-level positions in general.
But, she said, “Being in the tech space and going to school for computer science I think is fitting because we’re building the AI tools that we need to use in the workspace.”
— Colleen McKown
The AI cost debate
The shift from AI adoption to tokenmaxxing to AI cost restrictions has come quickly.
So, how are organizations thinking about AI costs right now?
Kiran Patel, WGSN chief technology officer and CNBC TEC Council member, said at the CNBC Technology Executive Council Summit that at first, AI “was sort of like the rounding error in the technology budget.”
“Now it’s the second-largest line item after talent,” Patel said.
While Patel said that has put AI usage under the microscope, it has not slowed down its usage. He pointed to recent Ramp data that suggests that AI costs at big companies has been largely flat in the last two months, even as usage has increased.
“That’s the disciplines fitting in now, because they are going into the optimization phase,” he said. “From experimentation to execution and now optimization.”
However, he said, CFOs are now more focused on if this AI spend is leading to the intended outcomes. “If it’s not, [they’re asking] about replacing the existing vendor,” he said.
David Treat, chief technology officer at Pearson, said this cycle has been seen before with other technology deployments.
“Pick your favorite scare resource that we get all fascinated about optimizing, and we go through a natural cycle of focusing on unit cost, Jevons Paradox kicks in, the unit cost goes down, the scale goes up, and then suddenly there’s a big bill,” Treat said. “My goal and focus with Pearson is can we get to the end faster and not having to go through the full cycle of having that CFO conversation be all about cost.”
Treat said while it’s always more difficult to measure an outcome than the cost input, “that’s where we’re putting our focus; less on the input and more on the output.”
— Ian Thomas
Hands-on learning is paramount with AI
AI trainings are becoming more common in many workplaces. CNBC’s Sharon Epperson asked three early-career professionals how training has helped them in their roles.
“I think the most that I’ve learned about AI was through hands-on working with different types of projects, so helping my team minimize the amount of manual tasks that they have to do, or for creating status reports, for example,” said ADT Product Life Cycle Analyst Jemima Gay.
Daniela Aizenman, Tenez AI strategist, agreed, saying that while she acknowledges the importance of companies providing AI training to their workers, there is no replacement for hands-on learning.
“I think some of the best training advice I ever got was from an old partner who was very AI-forward and always pushed the use of these tools,” she said. “The only answer he ever gave me was just ask [the AI tool] Cursor.”
“When you think of tools like Microsoft Word or Excel, you probably got a one end-to-end training where you learned functionality that still serves you today. But with tools like Cursor, Claude Code, Copilot, features are being constantly rolled out, and so I think one of the best ways to upskill and continue training you and your teammates is to just ask the tool and get comfortable self-teaching yourself how to best use it in your day to day,” Aizenman said.
— Colleen McKown
Keeping the human in content creation to avoid ‘AI slop’
Three young professionals speak with CNBC’s Sharon Epperson at the 2026 CNBC Technology Executive Council Summit on October 28, 2026. about how they are utilizing AI in their roles.
CNBC
As AI becomes more common in the workplace and in content online and on social media, the conversation around “AI slop,” or low-quality content produced with little human oversight, has intensified.
CNBC’s Sharon Epperson talked with three early-career professionals about how they navigate issues around AI slop and keeping the human element in AI-produced content.
“I think it’s really important to not only have context but also feed the tool what good looks like. At the end of the day, we’re all amazing at our jobs and we’ve done this without AI,” Daniela Aizenman, AI strategist at Tenez, said.
Orlando Foods Brand & Engagement Specialist Ally Figliuolo agreed, saying, “I completely relate to Daniela about prompting it in the best way you can and giving it the best information.”
“I think the most important thing is always still relating it back to a human connection,” Figliuolo said. “I really do read through every single detail, and it does take a little bit more time.”
— Colleen McKown
The New York Liberty’s AI “championship moment”
Keia Cole, Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment Chief Digital Officer, speaks with CNBC’s Scott Wapner at the 2026 CNBC Technology Executive Council Summit in New York City on October 28, 2026.
CNBC
Keia Cole, the chief digital officer of Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment, recalled the excitement of the New York Liberty’s first WNBA title in 2004 at the 2026 CNBC Technology Executive Council Summit.
But there was another off-court moment Cole said ranks up there during her tenure with the organization: a company-wide AI lab launched earlier this year.
“We were trying to figure out how to increase AI fluency across the organization, and we were doing the typical things: training, office hours, and meeting with specific departments,” Cole told CNBC’s Scott Wapner. “It wasn’t getting us where we needed to go.”
Cole said the strategy needed to shift, and a decision was made to encourage certain AI behaviors.
That led to the launch of an internal AI lab, an eight-week program that started on the literal basis of how you even identify a problem that AI can solve. From there, the program was scaled up, moving from identification to prototypes to solutions.
“It was the equivalent of a science fair,” Cole said, adding that the organization ended up with 14 solutions that spanned from fan engagement to budgeting to internal mentorship tools.
“There were a lot of ambitious efforts, and I was surprised at the complexity of the problems that people wanted to solve,” she said. “We also saw a lot of cross-functional teams and people seeking out others or teams that maybe they wouldn’t have worked with before.”
Cole said that while there were winners (and those that won received cash prizes), now the program is live all the time, allowing employees to think up new solutions for problems they encounter.
“There’s a real belief in our organization that if you create value for the organization, we will return some of that value to you,” Cole said.
— Ian Thomas
AI personalization is the next wave of sports fan engagement
Owned by Alibaba Group Chairperson Joseph Tsai, Brooklyn Sports and Entertainment has always looked to leverage technology across the Brooklyn Nets and New York Liberty, as well as within the Barclays Center where the two teams play.
Keia Cole, chief digital officer at Brooklyn Sports and Entertainment, told CNBC’s Scott Wapner that the organization has looked to dive even further into AI after seeing what it could do to elevate the fan experience.
“The core product, you’re not going to disrupt,” Cole said. “There’s still going to be humans on the basketball court. There’s still going to be artists coming to do concerts … but we really have this opportunity to think differently about how we work, how we serve our customers, and how we serve our fans, and get better content to them more efficiently, make it faster for them to get to where they’re going in the building and have more knowledge about that.”
Cole said that those are the things that “power the experience to make it feel like, ‘Yeah, I want to get off my couch and come to an arena.'”
That has meant using AI to improve the teams’ existing applications, help personalize the touchpoints that each fan has with the organization, and ticketing, among other things.
“How do we understand our fans and communicate to them in a way that’s personalized?” Cole said. “If you think about the nature of fandom, people are very dedicated, they’re very committed … we have all this detail for what it means to show up as a fan, and I think we should be giving that same attention to detail and commitment back to the fans — using AI and personalization is one way to do that.”
— Ian Thomas
Should AI agents be treated as employees?
Mason Argiropoulos, Paychex CHRO, and Barbra Katz, Crum & Forster CHRO, spoke with CNBC’s Susan Caminiti at CNBC’s Technology Executive Council Summit on October 28, 2026 in New York City.
CNBC
AI agents are starting to outnumber human employees at some companies. Should they also be considered employees?
A question from the CNBC Technology Executive Council Summit crowd posed that question to Paychex CHRO Mason Argiropoulos and Crum & Forster CHRO Barbra Katz, wondering how they are thinking about this. Do you have to think about treating non-human agent workers the way you treat humans, and maybe they will behave better if you do that?, the question asked.
Argiropoulos, a CNBC Workforce Executive Council member, said he and fellow WEC and Technology Executive Council members were actually discussing this at dinner last night, asking questions like whether agents should get performance reviews.
“At our company, we’ve got thousands of agents that are doing work of all different kinds. We haven’t yet integrated that into a lot of our people management processes just yet,” he said.
Argiropoulos acknowledged that agents need a degree of coaching and performance management. “You have to monitor what they’re doing, and if they’re not doing what they’re supposed to be doing, then you need to try to give them some additional prompting or some additional guidance so that they can ultimately achieve the result that you want to,” he said. “But I think we are still early days.”
Katz, also a member of the CNBC Workforce Executive Council, said, “[There are] no agents on the org chart for me. That’s not something that I envision happening, and I think that’s dangerous territory.”
While agents do have to be trained, she said “We shouldn’t confuse that with a human or human behavior.”
— Colleen McKown
Are open-weight models the future of AI?
There is plenty of debate around which AI firm will be at the top of the mountain as the technology continues to be deployed across the economy and society.
But from the perspective of Calix CEO Michael Weening, for companies like his that are using those models to deliver platforms to customers, it’s critical that organizations design their systems to be ready for any future.
“If we keep all the things that are valuable, which is we have the knowledge, we have all the workflows, we have the trust and security … as they commoditize, we can actually just flip the open-weight model out and put a new one in, and just keep flipping them in and out as these guys go to war,” Weening said. “We’re going to go take the best of the best at all times.”
Weening said he is increasingly betting that the future is based in open-weight models after what he said would be a “mass commoditization” of AI.
“We firmly believe that you’re going to see a mass commoditization, and that there is no value in AI because these are self-learning systems, and therefore they’re going to be commodities,” he said. “We wanted to be able to take advantage of what’s the best commodity on the market today.”
Calix Chief Product Officer Shane Eleniak said it’s becoming clear that the problems that the company is trying to solve, like many other companies, won’t be solved “with a generalist, centralized approach. It’s going to need to be specialized.”
“You just look at the scale of the problem. It’s no different than saying, why do we have brain surgeons and car mechanics? They’re very, very different skill sets. You start looking at security. You start looking at some of the bigger distributed problems. You’re not going to solve that with the centralized approach,” he said.
— Ian Thomas
When it comes to AI in the workplace, “folks are pretty hungry for it”
Rapidly evolving technology has the potential to create a sort of whiplash for companies and workers alike. CNBC’s Susan Caminiti asked Paychex CHRO Mason Argiropoulos and Crum & Forster CHRO Barbara Katz if the firm has seen signs that employees are getting overwhelmed by the pace of change.
Argiropoulos said he has actually seen that “folks are pretty hungry for it,” asking questions like when they’d be able to use certain tools. “I think we’ve got a lot more folks probably leaning in than you might originally think,” he said.
He thinks the biggest challenges will be at the enterprise level. “We want individuals to kind of do what they can in their power to help them be more efficient, more effective at the work that they’re doing. But we have to think about, what does that mean for an entire company,” he said.
Katz said, similarly, that she thinks workers are embracing the technology, but acknowledged that some have a level of fear, “particularly in pockets of jobs that we know are the most vulnerable to replacement,” she said.
“I think my worry really has more to do with what the workplace of tomorrow looks like, what are the skills that we’re hiring for, and how do I get my leaders to understand that they’re not hiring for the same things anymore, and that in itself is is really a mountain to climb,” Katz added.
— Colleen McKown
Navigating the growing pains of humans and AI working together 
Companies are dealing with the challenge of harnessing AI while balancing the needs of their employees.
When asked how she is dealing with the pace of change, Crum & Forster CHRO Barbra Katz, told CNBC’s Susan Caminiti, “I think it’s about taking into account the people before the technology and really taking the time to understand what the process is that we want to address.”
“For me, the message is really just slowing down, and really all the voices at the table being there,” said Katz, a member of the CNBC Workforce Executive Council.
“It’s very important for us as HR leaders to also understand the tech, so that we can understand the impact on people,” she said.
Paychex CHRO Mason Argiropoulos, also a member of CNBC’s Workforce Executive Council, added that it’s important to recognize that people are in different places when it come to understanding AI.
For instance, while developers and engineers can find the technology exciting, others in the organization see the technology as “still is a little bit scary … there is a worry that if I get too good at this, does that mean I’m going to be out of a job?”
It’s important for HR leaders, Argiropoulos said, to “meet people where they are.”
Katz said at Crum & Forster, they have tried to make AI fun for employees. For instance, they recently created a bot of CEO Marc Adee.
“Everything he’s ever said on a Friday is captured in what we call the Marc Bot, and so for our employees, it’s become a great tool,” she said.
“Before someone meets him for the first time, they go on and they ask Marc Bot some questions,” she explained. “So they’re able to sit there and say, ‘on January 12, you said this, and I was thinking about it.’ So it’s become a a great tool to understand his perspective and perspectives about the business.”
— Colleen McKown
Conversation about models being paused “almost irrelevant” to enterprises: Nigel Vaz
The debate around slowing down AI development to address safety issues is only growing as bleeding edge AI researchers from OpenAI and Anthropic publicly urging for it over self-improving AI and its risks.
But while continued AI development is critical for enterprises that are looking for AI ROI, this news cycle is not as critical for the way they’re using it.
CNBC’s Jon Fortt noted to Publicis Sapient CEO Nigel Vaz that there is “this idea that a really powerful general model is always going to get to the answer eventually better than any specialized model or expert … it doesn’t seem to necessarily work that way with safety,” Fortt said. “Maybe it’s going to find its way toward an answer, but it might break your kneecaps on the way getting there, right?”
Vaz acknowledged that safety is one dimension, but said, “As much as organizations talk about safety and it’s important to everybody, the first thing that hits you is the cost. And let me start with that. Like that’s the equivalent of basically saying, ‘Hey, I need to hang a picture on my wall. But is the best use to hang the picture on the wall a sledgehammer or a little hammer?'”
“When you actually talk about a large language model getting to the answer eventually better than a small language model, the context matters a whole hell of a lot because the choice of which model, how it actually gets there, and whether you even need it to get there,” Vaz said.
Vaz said that the conversation about models being paused is “almost irrelevant to most enterprises.”
“It doesn’t matter. They haven’t even leveraged the models that exist today to the fullest extent that they can,” he said.
— Colleen McKown
The potential for AI-driven attacks is growing
Userba011d64_201 | Istock | Getty Images
During an appearance at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that the growing AI-powered cybersecurity crisis is far from over.
“This cybersecurity…I don’t even know a dramatic enough word to use, but the problem coming towards us, I think, is still something that we have not, as organizational leaders or countries or individuals, taken seriously,” Altman said, according to Gizmodo.
At the CNBC Technology Executive Council Summit, Forum AI Founder and CEO Campbell Brown said that she sees a “rocky six months” ahead in this space, especially as the general public becomes more aware of the hacks and leaks that are occurring.
However, Calix CEO Michael Weening and CPO Shane Eleniak said they see the problem not only getting significantly worse but that the potential risk is even higher than anyone is forecasting.
“We haven’t seen anything,” Weening said. “The pace of change that we’re going through societally is something humankind is not ready for.”
Eleniak said to this point, these sort of large-scale AI-driven attacks have been a “nation-state problem” so far, largely due to the cost it would take to form such an attack.
But he said as open-weight models and economical GPUs become more accessible to bad actors, “something is going to happen; we’re all going to read about it.”
“You can take an open-weight model today, train it, and you can train it to be malignant, and you can run it on GPUs, and you can start to attack things,” he said. “That’s the security problem we’re going to be facing in ’27.”
Eleniak said the only way to combat this as things move forward is to have “container- trained models that their day job is to react to a dynamic attack and fix them.”
— Ian Thomas
Why companies are still opting for “old school” approach with hiring in the AI age
Crum & Forster CHRO Barbra Katz and Paychex CHRO Mason Argiropoulos speak with CNBC’s Susan Caminiti at the 2026 CNBC Technology Executive Council Summit in New York City on October 28, 2026.
CNBC
Companies have been grappling with the challenge of harnessing AI in the hiring process. Barbara Katz, Crum and Foster CHRO, expressed skepticism when it comes to leveraging the technology that currently exists.
“We’ve looked at technology to identify or to help you to identify the fraudulent candidates, and frankly, I wasn’t comfortable with a lot of the tech that’s out there. Some of the companies really don’t have a good business case. They haven’t been in business long enough,” Katz, a member of the CNBC Workforce Executive Council, said.
Katz said she still prefers an “old school” approach. “My recruiters are like detectives; they’re doing a whole dossier on people before they hire them, they’re searching to figure out where people went to school and coming up with trick questions to see if they know who the mascot is,” she said.
Mason Argiropoulos, Paychex CHRO, said he is taking a similar approach, “wading cautiously into the new tech landscape.”
“At the end of the day, companies are collections of people,” he said. “We’re going to be doing interviews face to face when we can.”
— Colleen McKown
AI shouldn’t be just a ‘dimmer switch’: Nigel Vaz
Nigel Vaz, Publicis Sapient CEO, speaks at the 2026 CNBC Technology Executive Council Summit in New York City on October 28, 2026.
CNBC
Pointing to the lights above the stage at the 2026 CNBC Technology Executive Council Summit, Publicis Sapient CEO Nigel Vaz told CNBC’s Jon Fortt that one of the issues that is plaguing companies when it comes to AI use is thinking about usage like lighting.
“So many conversations around tokens are like if I said to you if you could pay me for three watts,” Vaz said. “The question you want to know is will that turn on that light bulb or not, because what I care about is paying you for a unit of work.”
Vaz took the lighting metaphor a step further when Fortt asked him how AI ROI measurement should work then.
“Most employees want to see that they’re creating value through the work that they’re generating. So effectively deploying AI as like a dimmer switch to make everybody just a little brighter,” he said. “We are already past that phase.”
Vaz said AI usage needs to be grounded in outcomes that workers can understand, “and then contextualized about how it’s going to change their lives in that context.”
“The other way around, which is I think where a lot of AI projects started was, ‘Let’s deploy AI more broadly across the enterprise. Let’s give lots of people access. Let’s run a lot of experiments,'” he said. “I think you get value, but you make everybody just a little bit brighter. You may not meaningfully move the needle on a specific outcome.”
— Ian Thomas
AI’s enterprise vs. consumer challenge
Factual accuracy and political bias remain significant issues for AI consumer-focused outputs.
Forum AI Founder and CEO Campbell Brown said recent research by her firm suggests that 40% of all outputs had at least one major mistake or got one claim wrong.
“That’s not great,” she told CNBC’s Scott Wapner.
That is being amplified in the lead-up to the midterm elections, when people turn to chatbots or AI-powered search engines to ask where their polling places are, when they need to register, or what topics are on the ballot.
“You get those questions wrong, and you are taking away someone’s right to vote,” she said.
On top of that, Brown said that Forum AI’s research found instances of Anthropic’s Claude “pulling from the Chinese Communist Party website to answer questions about a U.S. election that had nothing to do with China.
“This, to me, is low-hanging fruit,” she said.
Wapner asked Brown whether AI labs are currently incentivized to correct that accuracy, or whether the focus on enterprise applications of AI is taking precedence.
“It’s been a low priority,” she said. “They’re making so much money from coding … this is a room full of CTOs, you know what they’re doing, and that’s where the emphasis has been. The consumer use cases have been less important.”
A TEC member asked Brown if she saw a future where the consumer becomes a priority for AI outputs, especially given the heavy adoption split so far between enterprise and consumer revenue generation.
“I don’t think the consumer is going to be a priority for a while; they’re just making too much money on the enterprise side, and they really don’t talk about political evals or election evals until we get public research and it gets picked up by the press,” Brown said. “It’s just not a priority and won’t be for a while until something happens.”
Brown pointed to how AI labs have reacted amid concerns around mental health, which she said has been “a wake-up call for them.”
“They sort of unleashed this and didn’t realize what a big use case that was going to be, especially with teenagers, and then you have these horrible incidents happening and litigation flooding into the labs,” she said. “So now they’re bringing in clinicians and people who actually know what they’re talking about … it goes back to the importance of having real expertise in the process.”
Making sure AI is implemented through the lens of the business
Nigel Vaz, Publicis Sapient CEO, speaks at the 2026 CNBC Technology Executive Council Summit in New York City on October 28, 2026.
CNBC
AI is creating new, fundamentally different operating models for businesses. But often AI engineers are not understanding the business in which they are operating, creating multiple issues when tracking ROI and success of the technology.
Nigel Vaz, Publicis Sapient CEO, told CNBC’s Jon Fortt that he was at a breakfast before the CNBC Technology Executive Council Summit where he met with a group of clients that his firm works with.
The CIO of an investment bank that Publicis Sapient works with told Vaz that the bank recently brought in some engineers from Anthropic.
“The client said, ‘I have 50,000 developers, and they gave me six incredible AI engineers from Anthropic. But they don’t understand investment banking. They don’t understand the bespoke coding language we use in the bank,'” Vaz said.
The client was highlighting something, Vaz said, that he continuously hears which is that people need to think about AI beyond the context of the technology, “because a technology or a tool given to an enterprise is just one part of the problem.”
“You need some people who understand the context of the business, not in terms of how it operates today, but who have a perspective on how it’s going to operate tomorrow because they’ve got to get somebody from here to there,” he said.
— Colleen McKown
The misleading nature of AI’s responses
Forum AI Founder and CEO Campbell Brown speaks with CNBC’s Scott Wapner at the CNBC Technology Executive Council Summit in New York City on October 28, 2026.
CNBC
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed published in June, Forum AI Founder and CEO Campbell Brown argued that as the world becomes more reliant on AI, there needs to be a more critical lens applied to AI’s output.
“Already it is so good its mistakes don’t look like mistakes,” Brown wrote.
Speaking with CNBC’s Scott Wapner at the CNBC Technology Executive Council Summit in New York City on Wednesday, Brown said the issue remains that “when you read an answer generated by AI, it’s presented with such confidence and clarity that it is hard to question it and identify where the mistakes may be.”
“I think that’s what’s particularly dangerous,” she said.
Brown, the former head of global media partnerships at Meta, said this issue is increasingly worrying as people turn to AI for political or election information, and that speaks to how the information is not only presented but where it is sourced.
“There’s a real critical piece to this that has been somewhat frustrating for me: the labs are not engaging as much as I think they should be with real subject matter expertise,” she said. “Human expertise in domains is essential to getting this right.”
— Ian Thomas
The tech-focused discussions at the CNBC WEC Summit
CNBC Workforce Executive Council members speak with CNBC’s Sharon Epperson at the 2026 CNBC Workforce Executive Council Summit in New York City on October 27, 2026.
CNBC
Yesterday, CNBC’s Workforce Executive Council held its annual Summit, and the discussion of how human resources professionals help workers adapt to this new AI age was at the top of the agenda.
Walmart, the biggest private employer in the world, asked its 2.1 million associates in June that exact question for the first time, trying to get a sense of how one of the most diverse workforces is experiencing AI.
What it found, based on more than 1.7 million survey responses, is that while workers have different levels of familiarity and comfort with AI, training and experience with the technology matters.
Seventy-seven percent of Walmart’s office-based associates said are excited about AI’s potential to improve their work, Walmart Chief People Officer for Associate Experience and Digital Maren Waggoner told CNBC’s Leslie Picker at the WEC Summit.
And as for Walmart’s U.S. frontline associates, 84% said they are confident using digital tools, a reflection of the AI-powered tools that many of them are now using in their roles, she said.
“We’ve given them certificates, we’ve given them training programs and tools, and so they’re using it in their day-to-day,” Waggoner said.
Jill Bruning, chief technology officer of Amentum and a member of the CNBC Technology Executive Council, said at the WEC Summit that strategy should be evolved to be humans in the lead.
“There’s an AI curve, and we see it. It’s going up and it’s going fast and has a lot of attributes to it; it’s quicker than anything we’ve seen before,” Bruning told CNBC’s Susan Caminiti. “So when you think about people on that curve … that gap is getting bigger every day.”
Bruning said she doesn’t know if leadership is adapting fast enough to the technology, and that is creating additional challenges with upskilling as well as what tasks are being delegated to AI.
“So your delegation skills are different, and then how do we tell the agents what to do? How do we define that role? She said. “That’s human over the loop, not in the loop. We’re still in charge.”
For more from the CNBC WEC Summit, you can see the full live blog here.
— Ian Thomas
Today’s top tech headlines
A drone view shows a data center at the Google Storey County Campus in the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center in Sparks, Nevada, Oct. 9, 2026. Hyperscaler spending on AI data centers has fueled a rise in tech sector bond issuance.
Daniel Cole | Reuters
Here are some of the top tech-focused headlines from CNBC this morning:
Google alters its cloud playbook, enlisting partners to sell more AI chips. Google started working on in-house silicon in 2013, but didn’t begin selling its tensor processing units (TPUs) to outside customers until the second quarter of this year. Now the company is tapping Oracle’s cloud as another avenue for selling TPUs as it tries to bolster competition with Nvidia in the AI chip market.Anthropic’s cash pile towers over nearly every U.S. company. Anthropic had $112.4 billion in cash and cash equivalents and $19.3 billion in short-term investments as of June 30. That exceeded every non-bank U.S. company in CNBC and S&P Capital IQ data except Berkshire Hathaway and Alphabet.Amazon’s anti-tokenmaxxing memo says engineers should be pickier about using AI. Amazon discouraged teams from relying solely on token usage or code generation as measurements of AI adoption, calling them “deeply flawed” metrics in an internal memo. The memo revises how the company defines the role of software development engineers and managers in the age of AI.
— Ian Thomas
What’s on the agenda at this year’s TEC Summit
This year’s TEC Summit is focusing on what is coming next in AI, whether that’s how companies are adapting their strategies based on the advancement in the technology to how they’re controlling the costs related to that build out.
Discussions will also center on AI regulation, agents, how workers are using the technology and where this acceleration of AI is taking society.
Speakers include:
Campbell Brown, Forum AI Founder & CEO: Brown will be discussing AI regulation, independent evaluation, what that looks like and how companies can use AI that can be trusted.Nigel Vaz, Publicis Sapient CEO: Vaz is at the center of how companies are rethinking their business models amid the AI age, and why that’s harder than learning how to use the technology itself.Calix CEO Michael Weening and CPO Shane Eleniak: Members of the team at Calix will pull back the curtain on how strategic AI decisions are made and implemented across the organization.Keia Cole, Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment Chief Digital Officer: Technology is also transforming the sports industry, and Cole will discuss how AI is being used at the Barclays Center and within the Brooklyn Nets and New York Liberty teams to make sports fans more connected and in touch.Jason Gowans, Levi Strauss Chief Digital & Technology Officer: Organizations are aiming to empower workers and customers with AI tools. Gowans will be sharing his approach to embedding AI into the everyday shopping experience.Jeetu Patel, Cisco President & Chief Product Officer: Rogue AI agents show no signs of slowing down, but Patel said companies need to think about them like they are teenagers. He’ll discuss ways companies can safely harness the power of agents and what it means to parent them.
— Ian Thomas