The Silent Power
AI in the company, for managing directors.
What AI already decides in companies, who configures it and how much of it ends up with management: that's what this newsletter is about. It's for managing directors of companies with 100 or more employees and appears every other Thursday on LinkedIn, alternating with “Before It Counts”. The newsletter is written in German.
This page lists every issue with its date and the sources it relies on. Each statement is checked against the original source before publication. If something changes afterwards, I add it to the issue concerned.
Under “Further notes” you'll find voices, studies and references for each issue that came in after publication or didn't fit into the text. Each entry says what kind of source it is. For conversation sources I report what was said. Whether it's true usually can't be checked there.
Terms used in the issues are explained in the glossary, each with its origin and what is changing right now.
Issues
Issue 2 · November 12, 2026
Four kinds of AI, and what each one asks of you (in German)
Only as much technology as a decision needs. Sources · Read on LinkedIn
Issue 1 · October 29, 2026
Where AI is already at work in your company (in German)
A test in two rounds, and why the project list is of little help. Sources · Read on LinkedIn · Read on the blog (in German)
Issue 0 · October 15, 2026
Since July 1, your license has included an AI decision (in German)
What AI takes over if we just keep going as before. Pilot issue. Sources · Further notes · Read on LinkedIn · Read on the blog (in German)
Next issue on November 26, 2026: What AI demonstrably delivers, and where it gets things wrong.
Sources for Issue 2
“Four kinds of AI, and what each one asks of you,” November 12, 2026. Sources checked on November 6, 2026, the two Gartner press releases once more against the original on November 12, 2026.
Generative AI: errors that look like results
Deloitte Australia: AP, “Deloitte to partially refund Australian government for report with apparent AI-generated errors”, October 7, 2025, and The Guardian, October 6, 2025. The report for the Australian Department of Employment and Workplace Relations contained invented references and an invented quote from a federal court judgment. Deloitte is paying back the last installment of its fee. The sources give different amounts, so the issue doesn't state one.
Agents: systems that act
Prokura (the statutory commercial power of attorney): German Commercial Code (Handelsgesetzbuch), § 48 (granted only expressly), § 49 (scope set by law), § 50 (restrictions not effective against third parties) and § 53 (registration in the commercial register). The sentence “What a Prokurist may do is set by law” is deliberately simplified.
EchoLeak: CVE-2025-32711, published June 11, 2025, entry at Microsoft and in the National Vulnerability Database. The vulnerability was found by Aim Labs (Aim Security). Microsoft closed it on its servers and, by its own account, found no customer data had leaked.
Agents in enterprise applications: Gartner, press release of August 26, 2025. It speaks of “up to 40%” of enterprise applications with task-specific agents by the end of 2026, up from less than 5 percent in 2025.
Canceled agent projects: Gartner, press release of June 25, 2025. According to it, more than 40 percent of agent projects will be canceled by the end of 2027 because of rising costs, unclear value or inadequate risk controls.
Four terms a decision needs
Training on your data: Terms of OpenAI and Google as of November 6, 2026. For the business offerings (ChatGPT Enterprise, Business and Edu, the API, Google Workspace) training on customer data is excluded. For the consumer offerings (ChatGPT Free, Plus and Pro, the Gemini app) it's switched on by default.
What the map shows
The decision in all but name: Guido Bosbach, “Cheap to Make, Costly to Check”, Volume 1 of the series Organization under AI.
For Monday
The step in more detail: Hack 3 in the collection of hacks on organization and AI.
This issue's task by email: Week 2 of the free email course “The Silent Power · The course” (emails in German), ten weeks, each week one task for your own company.
Sources for Issue 1
“Where AI is already at work in your company,” October 29, 2026. Sources checked on October 20 and 21, 2026.
Three ways in, and only one starts with a project
Three layers in which AI works: Guido Bosbach, “Cheap to Make, Costly to Check”, Volume 1 of the series Organization under AI, chapter 2.
Hidden AI use at work: KPMG and University of Melbourne, “Trust, attitudes and use of artificial intelligence: A global study 2025”. Global survey of 48,340 people. More than half of the employees surveyed say they hide their own use of AI at work.
Company figures as a lower bound: Martin Friedrich, Christian Kagerl, IAB-Kurzbericht 8/2026 (PDF in German). The IAB, Germany's Institute for Employment Research, explicitly calls the companies' figures on AI use a lower bound.
Round one: five minutes, off the cuff
The first question: from “Cheap to Make, Costly to Check,” chapter 2. The chapter contains a case that runs all the way through and Worksheet 1, the worksheet for the inventory in round two.
Round two: perhaps an afternoon
98 percent: The figure is a worked example and was never measured. It stands for a suggestion that in practice people almost never depart from.
This issue's task by email: Week 1 of the free email course “The Silent Power · The course” (emails in German), ten weeks, each week one task for your own company.
Sources for Issue 0
“Since July 1, your license has included an AI decision,” October 15, 2026. Sources checked on October 13, 2026.
License and plans
Microsoft 365, prices and features from July 1, 2026: announcement of December 4, 2025, price table in the Microsoft Licensing News. The dollar amounts there are US list prices. The euro prices for Germany are on the German Microsoft page.
Google Workspace, Gemini in the Business and Enterprise plans: Google Workspace blog, January 15, 2025.
SAP Joule in the base version: SAP Business AI, packages and pricing.
Use in German companies: Martin Friedrich, Christian Kagerl, IAB-Kurzbericht 8/2026 (PDF in German). Around a quarter of companies use generative AI, nine in ten of them publicly available tools. Just over one in five has internal rules.
Management's duty of care: § 43 GmbHG, § 93 AktG (German law on limited liability companies and on stock corporations).
What's on the table
AI summaries shift the framing: Alessa et al., “Quantifying Cognitive Bias Induction in LLM-Generated Content”, IJCNLP-AACL 2025, arXiv 2507.03194, ACL Anthology. Experiment with 70 participants and a hypothetical choice: 84 percent after the AI summary, 52 percent after the original reviews.
The decision in all but name: Guido Bosbach, “Cheap to Make, Costly to Check”, Volume 1 of the series Organization under AI.
Why nobody notices
Endoscopy without AI after three months with AI: Budzyń et al., Lancet Gastroenterology & Hepatology 2025;10(10):896–903, PubMed 40816301. Retrospective observational study in four Polish centers.
Humans and AI in decisions: Vaccaro, Almaatouq, Malone, Nature Human Behaviour 8 (2024), 2293–2303, full text at PubMed Central. Meta-analysis of 106 experiments.
Fewer hires of young workers in the US: Stanford Digital Economy Lab, “Canaries in the Coal Mine?”, paper, version of August 12, 2026, accompanying text. The authors describe patterns and offer no proof of causation.
Whoever sets the defaults, governs
Rollback of the GPT-4o update: OpenAI, statement of April 29, 2025, follow-up of May 2, 2025.
Ranking of rules in the model specification: OpenAI Model Spec, version of August 18, 2026.
Where the law doesn't look
Exception for preparatory tasks: Art. 6(3) of the AI Act, Regulation (EU) 2024/1689.
Postponed high-risk obligations: Regulation (EU) 2026/1744 (Digital Omnibus on AI), OJ L of July 24, 2026. For Annex III, including employment and HR, the obligations apply from December 2, 2027.
Private AI accounts and co-determination: Hamburg Labor Court (ArbG Hamburg), order of January 16, 2024, 24 BVGa 1/24, Landesrecht Hamburg (in German). Summary proceedings, first instance.
Insurers: Financial Times, April 2026 (paywalled), here as reported by Life Insurance International on April 23, 2026. US model clauses CG 40 47 and CG 40 48 (January 2026): Independent Insurance Agents & Brokers of America, October 21, 2025.
December 2028
No productivity effect according to self-reports: Yotzov, Barrero, Bloom et al., “Firm Data on AI”, NBER Working Paper 34836 (PDF), 2026. Survey of almost 6,000 executives, not peer-reviewed.
Further notes on Issue 0
Additions after publication. As of October 20, 2026.
Voices from practice
AI comes with the software, not with the project (conversation source): In the podcast “AI and the Executive Table” (episode “Compliance by Design,” July 7, 2026), governance and compliance expert Naureen sees the biggest risk in AI arriving quietly as a new feature in long-established company software. Her advice: ask vendors about their AI plans in regular supplier meetings. In the issue, the license renewal raises exactly this question. Podcast on Acast.
How trust in AI creeps up (conversation source): In the episode “AI Risk Management” (July 14, 2026), Naureen describes three phases. Users first check skeptically, then the tool beats their expectations, then they ask less and miss errors. A human in the loop who assumes the AI is right is no real control, she says. That fits the section “Why nobody notices.”
Why savings stay invisible (conversation source): Former CTO Kenza Ait Si Abbou now advises companies on scaling AI with her firm Scailers. In the episode “The AI Operating Model” (June 9, 2026) she reports that division heads never confirmed to her what an AI use case had saved. Anyone who reports savings sees them cut from next year's budget. For the findings in the section “December 2028” this is a possible additional explanation: part of the effect never appears in the figures because nobody has an interest in reporting it.
Addenda
None so far. If a statement from the issue changes, the change is recorded here with its date.
If you'd like to get “Before It Counts” a few days early by email, in German: read along here.