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For years, deepfakes were treated as a political or social media oddity, a strange corner of the internet where celebrity faces (of women 99% of the time) were pasted onto fake videos (porn in 99% of the cases) and nobody quite knew what to do about it. But that framing is now dangerously outdated, because deepfakes have quietly evolved into something much more systemic: an operational risk for corporations, capable of corrupting supply chains, financial workflows, brand trust, and even executive decision-making.
Recent headlines show that synthetic media is no longer a fringe experiment. It is a strategic threat, one that companies are not prepared for.
In February 2025, global engineering firm Arup fell victim to a sophisticated deepfake fraud. Attackers used AI-generated video and audio to impersonate senior leadership and convinced an employee to transfer $25 million in company funds. The World Economic Forum described it as a milestone event: the moment synthetic fraud graduated from experiment to enterprise-scale theft.
For any executive who still thinks of deepfakes as a social media phenomenon, this should be a wake-up call.
Arup had strong cybersecurity. What it didn’t have was identity resilience—the ability to verify that the human on the other side of the call was actually human.
In the past year, deepfake CEO-fraud attempts have surged, targeting CFOs, procurement teams, and M&A departments. A 2025 report noted that more than half of surveyed security professionals had encountered synthetically generated executive impersonation attempts.
It’s easy to see why:
One midsize tech firm reportedly lost $2.3 million after a convincingly faked audio call instructed finance to transfer funds for an “urgent acquisition.”
Clearly, traditional anti-phishing training doesn’t prepare employees for a perfectly reconstructed version of their boss.
When a deepfake impersonates a celebrity to promote a fraudulent investment scheme, that’s reputational damage. When a deepfake impersonates your spokesperson, CFO, product, or supply chain partner, that becomes a corporate disaster.
We’ve entered a phase where synthetic media sits squarely inside the business risk landscape, according to Trend Micro’s 2025 industry report. Synthetic content now drives new waves of fraud, identity theft, and business compromise.
This isn’t hypothetical. It’s operational.
Brands increasingly rely on complex ecosystems: logistics partners, suppliers, distributors, influencers, service providers, third-party integrators. Every one of those nodes depends on trust.
Deepfakes turn trust into an attack surface.
Imagine these scenarios:
These are not science fiction. They are logical extensions of attack patterns that are already being deployed — and they expose a blind spot in corporate risk management: the integrity of identity itself.
Political deepfakes spark outrage. Corporate deepfakes trigger something worse:
The Securities an Exchange Commision has already warned the financial sector that AI-generated impersonation is reshaping fraud strategies, calling for upgraded identity-verification standards.
If regulators are paying attention, executives should too.
Firewalls won’t stop a deepfake. Multi-factor authentication won’t stop a deepfake. Encryption won’t stop a deepfake.
Deepfakes weaponize something no cybersecurity team has historically been responsible for: trust in human appearance and voice. The weakest link is no longer a password. It’s a person’s belief that they’re speaking with someone they know.
Identity, not infrastructure, is the new vulnerability.
Most companies still relegate deepfakes to the PR desk or “misinformation team.” That’s naive.
Deepfakes threaten:
This is not just about fraud. Deepfakes can disrupt the coordination mechanisms that make supply chains work. They can paralyze a system without ever touching a firewall.
Here is the emerging best-practice playbook for executives:
The uncomfortable truth is that AI has made seeing and hearing obsolete. With AI, we’ve crossed a psychological Rubicon: Your eyes and ears are no longer authentication mechanisms.
Executives who fail to internalize this will face the same fate as companies that ignored phishing, ransomware, or cloud governance a decade ago—only faster, and with higher stakes.
Deepfakes are not about what is true: They are about what is believable. And in business, believability is often all that matters.
The companies that thrive in the AI era won’t be those with the biggest models or the flashiest copilots. They will be the ones that redesign trust, identity, and verification from the ground up.
Because if deepfakes can corrupt your operations and supply chain, then defending against them is not an IT problem. It is a leadership problem.
And if you don’t solve it now, someone else (perhaps an algorithm with your CEO’s face) might solve it for you.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Enrique Dans has been teaching Innovation at IE Business School since 1990, hacking education as Senior Advisor for Digital Transformation at IE University, and now hacking it even more at Turing Dream. He writes every day on Medium.