AI failures could cost executives their jobs, disrupt businesses worldwide, and expose sensitive data in 2027, according to new cybersecurity predictions from Forrester Research .
In the executive suite, for example, the company predicts an AI negligence lawsuit will force a CEO exit or leadership change at a large company.
"AI accountability in the US remains fragmented yet is veering toward the courts, where civil litigation is already testing liability for AI-enabled decisions," Forrester researchers noted in their report, "Predictions 2027: Cybersecurity And Risk."
They explained that the central argument in the case won't be whether AI failed, but whether leadership exercised informed judgment before delegating consequential decisions to systems they couldn't explain.
If such a lawsuit happens, the biggest ripple effect will be in boardrooms rather than in the AI industry, maintained Chris Ebert, senior vice president of go-to-market at SaaS Consulting Group , a technology consulting company in Austin, Texas.
"Boards and audit committees will start asking the same questions about AI that they ask about financial reporting — who owns it, what controls are in place, and how do we know it's working as intended?" he told TechNewsWorld.
"AI governance would move from an IT conversation to a governance and accountability conversation, which is where it belongs," he declared.
Ryan McCurdy, vice president of marketing at Liquibase , a database-change automation company in Austin, Texas, asserted that as AI starts making more decisions and taking more actions inside companies, accountability doesn't go away. "Someone still decides what the AI can access, what it can do on its own, and where a person needs to get involved," he told TechNewsWorld.
"Companies also need a record of what actually happened," he continued. "If an agent changes a database, deploys code or takes another action against a critical system, you should be able to see what it changed, what policies it passed, what authorized the action and what actually reached production."
"That trail becomes the proof that the controls were there and working," he said. "You can delegate work to AI. You can't delegate accountability."
Legal accountability for AI usage could lead to the end of fear-based marketing of frontier AI capabilities and the appointment of a single executive responsible for safe and compliant execution of AI, similar to the CISO, added Scott Miserendino, chief technology officer at Philadelphia-based DataBee , a Comcast company and developer of a data fabric for compliance, risk management, and security.
"Frontier AI lab CEOs will no longer be so willing to publicly call out the dangers of their product in order to make them seem cutting edge," he told TechNewsWorld.
Forrester predicts AI token spending will reach US$1.5 billion in 2027, with security operations and application security driving demand. Tokens are units used to measure AI model inputs and outputs and often determine usage charges. Security leaders will manage that spending as a core budget category, the firm said. Vendors will embed tokens into licensing agreements, and frontier model providers will compete directly for security budgets.
Organizations will need to shift from managing the adoption of AI to managing its cost and value, it added.
"Token costs will become a real constraint on how organizations deploy AI, particularly agentic AI," noted Robbie Mueller, technical lead for c…