AI 2027 Retold
The AI 2027 futurist scenario retold by a cloud security professional
Over this past weekend I was forwarded a post published by the AI Futures Project which is a well-researched and written futurist prediction of advancements in AI to the year 2027 and its consequences. It was a genuinely entertaining read, like an Isaac Asimov-esque science-fiction short story, and left me shook. I highly recommend checking it out!
I have no doubts of the impending omnipotent AGI its presents, but it fell short in one crucial area which is the AGI agentic services revolution which due to its proximity to the enterprise industry, regulated markets like defense, finance, and healthcare, critical infrastructure, and the broader security threat landscape will prove to be equally impactful! I also had a slightly different take on how foreign powers including China and others would react and respond based of their current posturing w.r.t cloud, data sovereignty, etc.
So here is my retelling of the AI 2027 story from a cloud security professional’s perspective.
2025: The New SaaS
AI companies will push out more capable AI models, and tech companies are well aware of the threat to their business; similar to the cloud threatening the previous on-premises industry. They rush to adopt the technologies and build the foundations of the impending AI agentic services revolution. The generic AI models are good, but stumble when applied to real-world business applications; tech companies will further invest in their own niche, bespoke closed-source AI models and agents to meet the need.
China feels the pressure of these advancements and in spite of the business frictions and lack of access to hardware will ratchet up its state-sponsored investments into AI and agentic technologies. Their economy is already in stress due to a major housing crash and overall crisis of confidence and see advancements in AI along with EVs, cloud, and others as an imperative. They will double down on their manufacturing might, access to rare-earth minerals, pressure on Taiwan, and other leavers to try to tip the scale to their advantage. They will still be behind the US but not by much.
US Tech companies will run into growing pains as they build out their purpose build AI agentic models primarily in the access to quality data without running into copyright and privacy concerns. China is unburdened by these dimensions and used it to their advantage to further narrow the gap. A burgeoning data broker and aggregation industry will be formed beneath the race of these two superpowers for AI agentic supremacy. Their business practices will raise the concerns in the US amongst privacy advocates, non-tech industry leaders, and some lawmakers.
The rest of the world will feel the significance of the AI agentic arms race and grow aware of how far behind they are. EU and west-aligned countries will mend their alliances with the US to ensure access to the technology and hardware but while investing internally as contingencies. Similarly, Russia, Iran, Syria, and other non-west-aligned countries will do the same in their relationship with China. The lines of the new first and second worlds are being formed along the lines of AI and agentic advancements.
The existing black market will explode as demand increases for offensive services and products to compromise supply chains of hardware going into building the AI data centers, zero-days to exploit the software used to train and house these AI models and their weights, DDoS the training and aggregations efforts of these models, and others. These threat actors and sellers will accelerate the research into the next generation of offensive capabilities against these agents like data poisoning, prompt injections, and others.
2026: Agentic Operationalization
As the first of AGI makes headways, Tech companies will introduce the first iterations of their AI agentic services to the market to significant demand as customers. ISVs and the software vendor industry will fundamentally transform to meet the demand and further drive it up. Regulated markets like finance, healthcare, and heavy industries will be slower to adopt the technologies citing compliance, privacy, and data governance concerns. Defense will also cite similar concerns but are further incentivized to expedite adopt due to the threat of China.
EU adoption will be in line with US regulated markets citing primarily concerns of GDP and others. Their homegrown efforts will bear some fruit, but still not globally relevant when compared to the two global powers. There will be other west-aligned countries, like Israel, Taiwan, and others that’ll be much faster to adopt AI agentic services from the US.
China will codify adoption of AI and agentic services as a national mandate and expedite adoption across their critical infrastructure, health care, finance, defense, and domestic surveillance. Attempting to leap frogging the US in adoption and operationalization of AI agentic services.
Threat actors are now well advanced in their AI and agentic offensive research and capabilities and have started running exploitation campaigns at varying scales against all nations. By the end of the year there will be at least one successful major attack possibly geopolitical fault lines like the Middle East, Taiwan strait, Ukraine Russia war, etc. Critical infrastructure and services like hospitals, power, utilities, will be impacted as a result and the world will have witnessed the first of offensive AI agentic attack.
2027: Agentic Cyber Warfare
An industrial scale digital transformation is underway to migrate to advance, adopt, and operationalize AI agentic services. The race to operationalize is incentivized both from market pressures to drive efficiency, and the threat of Chinese advancements. Individual tech workers will now only be responsible for monitoring and managing of the behaviors of these agents and ensure alignment. Employees who are unable to adopt or maintain relevance will lose their jobs.
The industry will now be migrating to a model of AI agentic networks; with hubs of super intelligent AGI and spokes being a network of niche, bespoke AI models and agents forward deployed across almost all industries and environments. Operationalization has gone well beyond SaaS and into other industries like media, academics, education, and others.
These industries are also barraged daily by a hoard of offensive agents and exposed to an unimagine scale of risk. A defensive measure will be maintained at scale by an army of defensive AI agents managed by a concretum of tech companies and defense agencies the daily monitor and thwart attacks. The intelligence community will further manage their own army of offensive AI agents purpose built to maintain the US advantage over the rest of the world. China, EU, Russia, Israel, and indeed most other countries will also employ a similar tactic to protect their digital sovereignty. We are now in the age of global scale AI agentic cyber warfare.
By the end of the year, AI and agentic services have percolated to all levels of the global politics, industry and society at large. They are involved in every aspect of life for everyone both at work, school, and home. They control our frame of reference and reality, and we are living in their simulation. Concerns of their intentions and true alignments are the most closely guarded state secrets. The only reassurances World leaders’ have is the that existence of a big red button somewhere to shut it all down.
This post was more of an exercise in creative writing than my usual technical posts which has been a quiet passion of mine, so would love to get your comments and feedback!