Worth Reading – AI Blackouts Are Coming: How Law Firms Can Maintain Enterprise Operations During Agent Grid Failure 2025
It is interesting to consider what businesses that invest heavily in AI for automation and replacing workers will do when the AI tools are down.
OpenAI’s “Connectors” access your Gmail and Drive, Microsoft’s Copilot Studio funnels everything through Azure, and Google locks you into its productivity suite. You’re not just buying a tool. You are hard-wiring your firm to that vendor’s infrastructure.
As Jennifer points out, last month, there was a three-hour period when OpenAI was unavailable. If your agentic AI tools rely on that grid, your work stops until it comes back. Can you afford not to have alternative options available in an emergency?
I saw something similar, but far less drastic, recently with Copilot as well. A few weeks back, there was a glitch with the Graph API that prevented Copilot from accessing calendar data from Exchange. For many users, the response to any prompt about upcoming meetings was “You don’t have any meetings scheduled.”
If only!!
I don’t think anyone I know was caused more than a slight inconvenience by this glitch, but it highlighted the risk of being too dependent on AI. If a glitch occurs that prevents it from responding appropriately, what would we do? How could we tell that it is glitching?
Perhaps we should include a bullet point or two in our business continuity plans for addressing AI outages. Of course, we might also consider the continuity plan for AI tools, or any SAAS solution, going under as well. It’s just good risk management.
How much of your AI work would be negatively impacted by even a few hours of downtime?
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