How deepfakes threaten business and what companies can do
By Faisal Hoque | Published: 2025-11-03 11:00:00 | Source: Fast Company – technology
On May 19, 2023, an image appeared on what was then called Twitter showing smoke billowing from the Pentagon after an apparent explosion. The photo quickly spread widely. Within minutes, The Standard & Poor’s 500 index fell sharply, resulting in the loss of billions of dollars in market value. Then the truth came out: the photo was fake, created by artificial intelligence.
Markets recovered as quickly as they declined, but the event marked an important turning point: it was the first time the stock market had been directly affected by a deepfake. It is unlikely to be the last. Just out of marginal curiosity, The deepfake economy has grown into a $7.5 billion market, with some forecasts predicting it will reach $38.5 billion by 2032..
Deepfake technology is now ubiquitous, and the stock market is not the only part of the economy vulnerable to its influence. Those responsible for creating deepfakes also target individual companies, sometimes with the aim of extracting money and sometimes simply to cause harm. In a Deloitte survey published in 2024, one in four executives reported this Their companies have been hit by deepfakes Which targeted financial and accounting data. Lawmakers are beginning to notice this growing threat. On October 13, 2025, California Governor Gavin Newsom Signed the California AI Transparency Act into law. When it was first introduced in 2024, the law required major “frontier service providers” — companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, Google, and X — to implement tools that made it easier for users to identify AI-generated content. This requirement has now been expanded to include “large online platforms – which essentially means social media platforms – and producers of devices that capture content.”
Faisal Haque’s books, podcast, and companies give leaders the frameworks and platforms needed to align purpose, people, processes, and technology—to transform disruption into meaningful, lasting progress.
Such legislation is important, necessary, and long overdue. But it is far from enough. The potential commercial impact of deepfakes extends far beyond what any single piece of legislation can address. If business leaders want to address these impacts, they must be alert to the risk, understand it, and take steps to reduce the risks to their organizations.
How do deepfakes threaten business?
Here are three important and interconnected ways in which deepfakes can harm businesses:
1. Direct attacks
The primary vector for direct attacks is targeted impersonation scams designed to extract money or information. Such attacks can cause sophisticated operators to lose millions of dollars. For example, UK engineering giant Arup lost out HK$200 million (about US$25 million) Last year after scammers used AI-generated copies of senior executives to request money transfers. Hong Kong police, who described the theft as one of the world’s largest deep frauds, confirmed that fake voices and images were used in video conferencing software to trick an employee into making 15 transfers to multiple bank accounts outside the company.
After a few months, WPP, the world’s largest advertising company, faced a similar threat When scammers cloned the voice and image of CEO Mark Read and tried to get money and sensitive information from their colleagues. The attempt failed, but the company confirmed that a convincing fake photo of its leader was used in the scam.
The ability to create digital solutions that can speak and act convincingly is still in its infancy, yet the capabilities available to fraudsters are already very powerful. Soon, it will be impossible in most cases for humans to know they are interacting with a deepfake solely on the basis of audible or visual cues.
2. High verification costs
Even organizations that are never directly targeted end up paying the price for the fallout. Every deepfake that circulates—whether it’s a fake CEO, a fabricated news event, or a fake ad—increases the collective cost of doing business. The result is the increased burden of verification that every company now must shoulder simply to prove that its communications are genuine and its actions are authentic.
Companies are already tightening internal security protocols in response to these threats. Gartner suggests By 2026, about 30% of organizations that rely on facial recognition security tools will look for workarounds as these protections become unreliable due to AI-generated deepfakes. Replacing these tools with less risky alternatives will require a significant amount of investment.
Each additional layer of verification — watermarks, biometric tools to detect that an individual is a living human, chain-of-custody records, and forensic review — adds costs, slows down decision-making, and complicates workflow. These costs will continue to escalate as deepfake tools become more sophisticated
3. Trust tax
In addition to the direct costs that arise from confronting deep security threats, the simple possibility that someone will use this technology erodes trust in all relationships based on digital media. Given that almost all business relationships now rely on some form of digital communication, this means that deepfakes have the potential to undermine trust across almost all business relationships.
To name a few, phone calls and video calls are some of the most basic and common tools used in modern business communications. But if you’re not sure that the person on the screen or on the other end of the phone is who they claim to be, how can you trust anything they say? And if you are constantly operating in a world of uncertainty about the credibility of your communication channels, how can you work productively?
If we start by mistrusting something as basic as our daily communication styles, the result will eventually be widespread suspicion that seeps into every relationship, both inside and outside our workplaces. This type of uncertainty undermines operational efficiency, adds layers of complexity to dealmaking, and increases friction in any task that involves remote communication. This is the “trust tax” – the cost of doing business in a world where anything might be fake.
Four steps companies should take
Here are four steps all business leaders should take to respond to the deepfake threat:
1. Validate what matters
Use encrypted signatures for official data, watermarked executive videos, and communication channels, and use source tags for sensitive content. Don’t try to secure everything, but rather focus your verification efforts where lies may be most damaging.
2. Building a “Source of Truth” center.
Create a public verification page listing your official channels, press contacts, and authentication methods – stakeholders should know exactly where to go to confirm what’s real. If your organization relies on external sources of information for rapid decision making, ensure that they are only accessed through similarly authenticated centers.
3. Training for the age of deepfakes
Conduct deepfake awareness training and build verification knowledge in onboarding, media training, and customer outreach.
4. Treat detection tools as essential infrastructure
Invest in tools that can detect manipulated media in real-time and then integrate these solutions into key workflows – financial approvals, HR interviews, and investor communications. In the age of deepfakes, verification is an essential operational capability.
From threat to opportunity
Social media echo chambers, conspiracy theories, and “alternative facts” have been chipping away at our shared sense of reality for more than a decade. The emergence of AI-generated content will make this disintegration of shared reference points exponentially worse. An earlier generation of Internet users used to say, “Either the pictures happened or they didn’t happen.” Okay, now we can have all the pictures we love, but how do we know if what they’re showing happened at all?
Business leaders cannot solve the fragmentation of perceived reality or the disintegration of communities. They alone cannot restore trust in institutions or reverse the cultural forces driving this crisis. But they are He can Grounding their organizations’ behavior and communications in verifiable reality, they He can Building systems that increase trust.
Leaders who swim against the tide in this way will not only help protect their organizations from the dangers of deepfakes. And when seeing is no longer believing, these companies will also become beacons that people rely on to navigate through an increasingly uncertain world.
Faisal Haque’s books, podcast, and companies give leaders the frameworks and platforms needed to align purpose, people, processes, and technology—to transform disruption into meaningful, lasting progress.
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(tags for translation) Deepfakes
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