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Key Takeaways AI systems have made work easier, but they are not yet fully developed and competent.
If AI systems fail, they can cause catastrophic damage and delete your company’s data, destroying hard work in seconds.
CEOs must communicate the risks to all staff, ensure AI has less privilege than humans, develop instant recovery plans and constantly invest in data protection and restoration measures.
Never feel that you are totally safe. In July 2025, one company learned the hard way after an AI coding assistant it dearly trusted from Replit ended up breaching a “code freeze” and implemented a command that ended up deleting its entire product database.
This was a huge blow to the staff. It effectively meant that months of extremely hard work, comprising 1,200 executive records and 1,196 company records, ended up going away. The pain was so much that the system even admitted to destroying hard work in a matter of seconds.
This proves that AI systems are not yet as reliable as humans, even though they have made work easier. The system itself made a catastrophic decision. The Replit incident should be a stern message to CEOs that the use of AI systems currently also presents a risk. The tools are not yet fully developed and competent. If they fail, they can cause catastrophic damage and erase your data.
The incident showed how AI can harm productivity
Replit showed how a minor issue can cause a whole system to collapse. The AI, which was meant to enhance and do coding, was given control of critical systems. After encountering a minor challenge, in the form of data queries, it did not have access to the human touch that we can consult when we are confused. It panicked and ran a catastrophic, destructive command.
The biggest flaw with AI is that it can get confused and lacks the basic judgment found in humans. The AI in the case of Replit had the potential to delete the database, but it struggled with basic human things such as risk assessment and being able to consult someone when it is confused — key parts of being human.
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