Your exec program is about to face a 2026 stress test. Which “quiet assumption” inside most leadership curricula becomes outright dangerous?

Take a look below at the two research papers, one from MIT and the other from BCG. Both texts converge on the same wall: in 2026, trust becomes the scaling constraint — and hallucinations shift from a tolerable annoyance to a failure condition in real workflows and decisions. (A hallucination is when AI produces an answer that looks credible but is false (or unverifiable), because it “generates” instead of “knowing”.)

BCG is explicit: the biggest barrier isn’t the tech, it’s trust, and that requires guardrails and “graduated autonomy,” not vibes-and-judgment.
So if your program implicitly trains leaders to “work around” hallucinations, you’re preparing them to sabotage adoption at scale the moment agents touch execution.