AI Can Calculate a Risk. It Can’t Carry One.

First published in Norwegian in Dagens Perspektiv on 3 November 2026, as “KI mister ikke nattesøvnen – det er problemet”. Republished in English with permission.

Close to 150,000 kroner a year. That is what we no longer pay in licence fees for a customer dialogue tool, because AI helped us build our own replacement at Izy. AI drafts replies to customer enquiries, and a person checks them before they go out. One person steered the work over a few evenings, and it already runs stably in production. A few years ago it would have taken a whole team and a quarter.

The code was not what surprised me. AI shaped the idea and sketched the design. When the tool failed, it read the logs, found the cause and proposed the fix itself. The whole loop, from idea to build, run and repair, went round with AI in every step.

I was left with three conclusions.

Software is no longer a moat

The company that sold us the software did nothing wrong, but it was no longer hard to copy. If one person can build this in a few evenings, so can your competitor.

What still protects a company is three things no prompt can create.

First, your own data or patents. Every competitor can rent the same AI models, but none of them can rent your years in operation. Finn, Norway’s largest marketplace, knows what a used bike costs in Bergen. At Izy we know how many people come into the office for lunch in the weeks before Christmas. Knowledge like that is built over years, not over a weekend.

Second, networks and signed agreements. A contract with a building owner, a licence, or a customer who picks up when you call.

Third, something physical. Anyone can now write software that counts bottles, but it is Tomra that has its machines in shops all over the world.

Someone still has to carry the risk

Norwegian leaders have spent two years asking their people to use AI, and that battle is largely won. The next question is who is responsible for what AI does. We give people responsibility without looking over their shoulder, but as AI does more of the work, that trust still needs someone to rest on.

Around 3,800 years ago, Hammurabi’s laws held that if a house collapsed and killed its owner, the builder paid with his life.

Imagine an AI rolling out a fix to a bank’s payment system overnight. It passes every test, but the next day card payments fail across the country. The model does not lose sleep. The next time it runs, it starts with a blank slate.

We humans do not. We have limited time, a body that feels an incident at two in the morning, and a reputation to lose. That weight is the reason someone checks one more time.

AI can calculate a risk. It cannot carry the weight of it.

Judgement is the new competitive advantage

A model only knows what has been written down. It does not see that your biggest customer went quiet in the last meeting: the crossed arms, the shorter answers. Someone who has sat through a hundred meetings like that picks it up in seconds. That is intuition, earned by being wrong and paying for it.

Most organisations are built like a relay race, with whole layers that coordinate, summarise, approve and pass the baton on. AI now runs that relay faster than any layer can, but it cannot own the decision.

I call the answer the sleep test. Let AI run the loop, but at every point of no return, whether it involves money, personal data or anything the customer sees, ask one question:

Who loses sleep if this goes wrong?

If the answer is a team or a process, and not a name, you are not ready.

I would like to hear from Norwegian organisations that already use the sleep test. I suspect there are not many.

Hammurabi’s builders worked in clay. We work in prompts. Almost four thousand years later the builder has changed, but someone still has to pay when the house falls. Soon every company will have the same AI. The winners will be the ones where a person still carries the weight of every decision. Build what it cannot have: intuition, judgement, taste and the courage to take responsibility.

Let the machine do the work. Keep the weight yourself. That is what leadership means now.

Saurav Pandey is a Technical Product Manager at Izy AS and writes about AI and accountability. The views are his own. If your organisation already runs something like the sleep test, I would like to hear about it: post@saurav.no.