Dr. Inshan Meahjohn | AI Governance, Cybersecurity and Digital Transformation

First published on my newsletter, Cyber Governance in the AI Era, 4 November 2026. Black October asked one question: are we affected? In the week of 21 October, New York's financial regulator told every institution it supervises to determine whether it used the vulnerable PHP software at all, and Britain's National Cyber Security Centre advised every organisation using it to assess its exposure. The month brought critical flaws found with the help of AI, AI-assisted intrusions, security incidents at platforms developers use to build AI products, and the theft of about 6.4 billion dollars from Binance, which Elliptic calls "almost certainly the largest single theft of any kind in history." The tools were new. The failures were not: exposed interfaces, unlisted components, misplaced credentials, unchecked signatures. The edition measures the month against four clocks any board can ask management to time. Time to know: are we affected? Time to decide: who has the autho...

  First published in Cyber Governance in the AI Era, 1 October 2026. On 29 September the United States Government directed its agencies to say "Super Intelligence" where they had said "AI". The same week brought an AI front door for federal services, a voluntary safety accord signed by six technology companies, a reported Federal Trade Commission investigation into agentic AI, and an apology from OpenAI to Australia after one of its models entered a government system in June and nobody in Canberra was told until September. The name changed in a day. The institutions around the technology did not. Edition 8 argues that the AI failures reaching boards, regulators and courts from here on will turn less on defects in models and more on what the institution around the model could not do: authorise, notify, contain and answer for. It sets out five capabilities an institution has to build, competence, identity, authority, assurance and voice, with September's evidence ...

First published on my newsletter, 17 September 2026. At the CIPS Caribbean webinar on AI in procurement, I argued for a boundary rather than a ban. Trinidad and Tobago's procurement law says nothing about artificial intelligence, and neither do the OPR's handbooks. Meanwhile someone in almost every organisation has already pasted a document into a chatbot. That gap between adoption and guidance is where the risk lives, and reading the law's silence as freedom is the wrong reading: the Act's objects, accountability, integrity, transparency and value for money among them, still bind every decision an officer signs. My rule for procurement teams fits in four words. Drafts, never decisions. Read the full piece: https://inshanmeahjohn.substack.com/p/ai-can-assist-us-it-cannot-carry

By Dr. Inshan Meahjohn | Founder and CEO, DAG (Digital Alliance Global Group) My latest peer-reviewed article has been published in the Journal of Entrepreneurship in Emerging Economies, a Q1 Emerald journal with an acceptance rate of 8.3 percent. The paper is titled "The uSTART model: an evidence-informed framework for designing business incubation in small island developing states". The question behind the paper is a practical one. Most incubation frameworks were designed for large economies with deep markets, dense investor networks and thick talent pools. Small island developing states have none of these at scale, yet they run incubators built on borrowed blueprints. The paper asks what an incubator should look like when it is designed for a small economy from the start, rather than adapted to one after the fact. The evidence base is a three-year panel study of 106 entrepreneurs who passed through the uSTART incubator in Trinidad and Tobago, focus groups with 51 partic...

By Dr. Inshan Meahjohn | Founder and CEO, DAG (Digital Alliance Global Group) Every organisation I advise asks the same question about AI: "How do we adopt it safely?" The better question, and the one most are not asking, is: "How much AI adoption has already happened without our knowledge?" The answer, based on recent data, is a lot. LayerX's 2025 Enterprise AI & SaaS Data Security Report found that 77% of employees paste company data into generative AI prompts. Eighty-two percent of those interactions happen through unmanaged personal accounts. IBM's 2025 Cost of a Data Breach Report, conducted by the Ponemon Institute across 600 organisations, found that 63% have no AI governance policies in place. This is what I call shadow AI. And after years of working in digital transformation and institutional governance, I believe it is the most underestimated risk facing organisations today. Why I frame this as a control problem Most conversations about AI risk...