Artificial intelligence is everywhere. It fascinates, challenges, and transforms our organizations at an unprecedented pace.
In corporations, AI initiatives are multiplying. Opportunities seem infinite and objectives sometimes remain vague, while questions of governance, accountability, and control are frequently relegated to the background.
In this article, Alexandre Ney, Head of Innovation & Digital Solutions, invites you to discover a fictional client case study inspired by trends, research, and emerging signals. A projection that transports us to 2040 to explore the consequences of our decisions.
A story that reminds us that with AI, every decision made today leaves a footprint that could be felt for decades.
The day Camille Berthier understood
Camille Berthier assumed her role as Chief Executive Officer of Terra Vitae on October 4, 2040. She is 47 years old. Until then, she managed the cooperative’s Italian operations. The board recalled her urgently following the resignation of the previous leader.
Terra Vitae is a biodynamic cooperative founded in 2021 by 28 farms on the Swiss Plateau to pool Demeter traceability and B2B marketing for Michelin-starred restaurateurs. Nineteen years later:
- 187 member farms across Switzerland, Austria, and Northern Italy;
- 242 employees at the core of the cooperative;
- and 290 million CHF in revenue.
On January 15, 2041, Camille convened the board.
“We no longer know why we make the decisions we make.”
— Camille Berthier, CEO of Terra Vitae, Board Meeting of January 15, 2041
The details she presented were more precise and stark.
WHAT CAMILLE FOUND IN ONE HUNDRED DAYS
- 387 AI agents in production. No up-to-date mapping inventories them.
- 73% of operational decisions are made without human validation.
- No current employee participated in the design of the central system; the original engineers all left the cooperative between 2030 and 2034.
- The last comprehensive audit of the AI layer dates back to 2031.
- Three strategic contracts were automatically renewed at a loss. Cumulative total: -4M CHF.
- A European regulator has just opened an investigation for non-compliance with the AI Act, applicable to exports to the EU (transparency and human oversight).
- Three SaaS vendors hold the models governing 60% of operational decisions; exiting would cost 12M CHF and take eighteen months.
The board gave Camille ninety days to produce a credible restructuring plan. Failing that, Terra Vitae will be placed under administration.
The incident did not occur on a Tuesday at three o’clock in the morning. Terra Vitae drifted for fourteen years, with absolute confidence, into an opaque zone whose progression no one was measuring.
How did we get here?
The story of Terra Vitae is not one of incompetence.
Between 2026 and 2030, Terra Vitae did what most cooperatives of its size did: deploy AI everywhere, rapidly, in response to urgent operational needs. Eight agents in 2026. Ninety-five in 2030. More than three hundred in 2035.
Each deployment resolved an immediate problem: weather, irrigation, traceability, B2B reporting, customer support.
Each deployment created a dependency that no one took the time to map.
Four decisions sealed Terra Vitae’s fate
DECISION NO. 1, 2026
Allowing each business unit to deploy its own agents.
The decision stemmed from a good intention: the IT department was overwhelmed, and marketing, procurement, logistics, and finance were allowed to choose their own tools without any central body supervising. In 2040, the cooperative runs on six different clouds and four incompatible protocols, without an overall inventory map
Agents do not communicate with each other, except when they inadvertently trigger one another, and no one knows who initiated what.
DECISION NO. 2, 2027
Signing SaaS contracts under the vendor’s standard terms.
No one negotiated a reversibility clause, prompt history exports, or ownership of the fine-tuned models. Ultimately, three vendors hold the keys to a system that Terra Vitae does not own.
DECISION NO. 3, 2027
Not versioning prompts like code.
At the time, prompts were considered transient “technical files,” never linked to business specifications or accompanied by a history.
When the original developers left—all of them prior to 2034—the prompts became tribal folklore. No one, in 2040, knows why the pricing agent applies a coefficient of 0.847 to Southern markets, but it has been applying it for eleven years.
DECISION NO. 4, 2028
Not training the Executive Committee to understand an AI system.
This was the most discrete decision, yet the one with the heaviest consequences. The Executive Committee relied entirely on explanations from the IT department, which itself depended on vendors.
When strategic trade-offs arose in 2028, 2030, and 2033, the decision chain was fed by information that no leader could cross-examine.
What this dystopia says about 2026
Terra Vitae is fiction; its trajectory is not. Three signals measured today are sufficient to map its curve.
Gartner, August 2025: 40% of enterprise applications will integrate AI agents by the end of 2026, compared to less than 5% in 2025. This is the fastest adoption curve ever measured across all technologies. However, 40% of agentic projects will be abandoned by the end of 2027 due to spiraling costs, unclear business value, and inadequate risk management. The steps are everywhere. The handrails, nowhere.
McKinsey, State of AI 2025: only 6% of surveyed organizations derive an EBIT impact greater than 5% from their AI investments. These “high performers” have one thing in common: they redesigned their business processes before deploying the technology. Not after. The difference is not the technology. It is the sequence in which things are built.
DORA 2025 (Google Cloud, 5,000 professionals surveyed) summarizes the mechanism in a single sentence:
“AI doesn’t fix a team; it amplifies what’s already there.”
— DORA 2025 — State of AI-Assisted Software Engineering
AI does not correct a dysfunctional organization. It amplifies its inefficiencies, faster, on a larger scale, and with less visibility. Terra Vitae is what an organization becomes when it amplifies its flaws without ever correcting the foundational layer.
The good news is that the foundation can be corrected, and it can be corrected using the four pillars we implement at Qim info.
The four pillars to avoid becoming Terra Vitae
Each pillar addresses one of the four decisions that compromised Terra Vitae.
None is optional. They must all be deployed together, or the structure will fail.
PILLAR 01 · STRATEGY
Map before accelerating
Prior to any deployment, we build an inventory of use cases, prioritize them by business value and risk level, and—crucially—decide on the question no one likes to ask: what do we deliberately choose NOT to automate, and why?
This is the question that would have saved Terra Vitae, and it is also the one confirmed by McKinsey: successful organizations begin by redesigning their processes before deploying technology. Mapping is not a consultant’s deliverable; it is an annex to the strategic alignment between executive leadership and the IT department.
PILLAR 02 · TECHNOLOGY
An architecture that constrains, rather than suggests
An agent should not merely be “well-configured”: its boundaries must be embedded within the infrastructure itself, where a prompt cannot bypass them. This is the spirit of zero-trust applied to agents, and it relies on three principles that will not change, even as the tools supporting them evolve.
1- Strong identity and authentication. Each agent has a verifiable identity, explicit permissions, and limited-lifetime access rights—exactly what is expected today of a human or a service. Current components are named OAuth or SPIFFE/SPIRE; tomorrow there will be others. The principle remains: no agent acts without an identity or a mandate.
2- Standardized and auditable communication. Agents coordinate via open protocols rather than custom integrations, making every exchange traceable and replaceable. The A2A protocol is a current illustration; what matters is not depending on any proprietary dialect.
3- Access to tools and data through a controlled interface. An agent never interacts with a system directly: it passes through a layer that exposes what it is authorized to do and logs the rest. This is the role played today by a protocol like MCP. The technology will change; the principle of a single, observable point of entry will remain.
Concretely: a procurement agent cannot modify the production schedule. Not because a prompt forbids it, but because its identity does not grant the permission and the interface does not provide the action.
PILLAR 03 · METHODOLOGY
Traceability by default
Every prompt in production is versioned like code; every automated decision is logged, timestamped, and repeatable; and every agent is defined in YAML with explicit rights, a list of authorized tools, and a managed lifecycle.
This is what DORA 2025 calls spec-driven development: the business specification is written before coding the agent, and the agent can be audited against this specification at any time. Without this discipline, you automate poor practices at scale and discover the issue when it is too late.
PILLAR 04 · PROCESS & PEOPLE
Rebuild roles before AI rebuilds them for you
Three roles emerge in any organization successfully transitioning to agentic AI, and none appeared in job descriptions in 2024.
The Intent Architect formalizes upstream what the enterprise intends, in a language that the agent can execute and a human can audit. The Quality Supervisor reviews the decisions and code produced by agents to filter them. The Escalation Manager defines, contractualizes, and enforces the thresholds beyond which an agent MUST stop and call a human.
Goldman Sachs initiated this movement as early as July 2025: thousands of agents deployed alongside 12,000 developers, with no job cuts, resulting in a +40% increase in productivity and a -15% reduction in production bugs.
The question we ask
To every leader we meet, we ask the same question.
In ten years, your decisions will be driven by a system. What will you have done today to ensure it remains understandable by your teams?
In 2026, no one at Terra Vitae asked this question. Neither its leaders, nor its competitors, nor the rest of the market: everyone was too busy to pause for a dystopia that seemed improbable.
The architecture you build today—your maps, your contracts, your versioned prompts, your repositioned human roles—is the only viable answer. Everything else is a vendor promise.
Alexandre Ney
Sources utilized
- Gartner — 40% of enterprise applications will integrate AI agents by 2026 (August 2025) · 40% of agentic projects abandoned by 2027 (June 2025) · “agent washing”: ~130 real vendors out of thousands (IT Symposium, Dec. 2025).
- DORA 2025 — Google Cloud, State of AI-assisted Software Development. 5,000 professionals. Seven core capabilities. dora.dev
- McKinsey State of AI 2025 — “AI high performers” (6% of respondents) are three times more likely to have redesigned their workflows before AI deployment.
- Goldman Sachs — Marco Argenti, CTO, July 2025: thousands of AI agents + 12,000 developers. +40% time-to-deliver, -15% post-release bugs.
- Linux Foundation · A2A Protocol — Standard Agent-to-Agent, 2026, supported by 150+ organizations including Atlassian, Salesforce, SAP.
- European AI Act — Regulation (EU) 2024/1689. Transparency and human oversight obligations for high-risk AI systems (entry into force of key provisions: June 2026).
Terra Vitae is a fictional biodynamic cooperative. All cited sources and data figures are real and publicly verifiable.
