A few days ago, hackers took over high-profile Instagram accounts, including the Barack Obama White House profile. And they did so by politely asking Meta’s AI support chatbot to update the email addresses on those accounts.

The attack method was childishly simple. No sophisticated exploit, no back-end breach — and that was the shocking part.

Meta had given its support bot the ability to reset passwords and manage account recovery. The bot was not mature enough to distinguish between the actual account owner and a fraudster using a VPN and a politely worded request.

When we connect an AI agent to our CRM, our HR system, and our finance workflows, we are not just giving it the ability to read. We are giving it the ability to act. This ability to act is what makes agentic AI the most powerful software technology we have in recent decades. But at the same time, we need to ask ourselves: if someone prompted this agent cleverly, what could they get it to do?

To me, the takeaway from this Meta incident is simple. Any access to a critical system needs to follow the same protocols that a manual process would follow. In fact, I would require the AI agents to follow even more stringent ones.

And if there is an irreversible action or a decision involving critical business systems, then there needs to be a human checkpoint — not as a backup, but as a design requirement. At least for now, while we are still developing the understanding and the systems to manage what these autonomous agents can trigger.

Think of the early web. Enterprises did not open their corporate systems to the public internet overnight. There was a long, cautious period of learning what the exposure actually meant before the architecture caught up.

None of this is an argument against agentic AI. The potential is real, and I believe in it. But bleeding-edge technologies do exactly what the name suggests — they spill blood before they stabilise. The real question is whether your business can handle the loss. Mega corporations like Meta can. Can yours?

As for me, I will keep reminding myself: how fast we roll out AI matters, but how robustly we build matters just as much.