Five Channel Islands Experts on Why Technology Alone Falls Short

Five experts from five different corners of the Channel Islands’ business community published their work in the same week, covering cyber security, AI in marketing, workforce tooling and financial crime compliance. By Friday, the Channel Eye summary caught the pattern: “technology itself is no longer the biggest challenge. The real challenge is how organisations implement it, govern it, secure it and equip people to use it effectively.”

That consensus is the story. The five contributors were not running the same brief, and only two of them ever wrote about the same topic. Yet, each landed on the same hidden stakeholder: not the software buyer, not the regulator, not the AI vendor, but the people inside the organisation who have to set systems up, supervise them and decide when not to trust them.

Where Five Very Different Experts Landed Together

Channel Eye’s Technology and Innovation Focus Week ran the week of 22 June 2026 and was fully subscribed several weeks ahead of publication, with all contributor places allocated and additional organisations placed on a waiting list. The five pieces ran in sequence: Cyber Tec on the new Jersey Cyber Security Law, Logiq on Zero Trust architecture, Edward & James on AI in content marketing, Prosperity 24/7 on the workplace AI skills gap, and KYC360 on continuous compliance monitoring.

Each contributor came at technology from a different angle, and the technology itself is no longer the biggest challenge framing in the Channel Eye summary made the convergence impossible to miss. Digital Jersey chief executive Tony Moretta, writing separately for Channel Eye, distilled the implication into three priorities for government and business “as we move from the conversation phase to adoption and implementation: skills, trusted infrastructure and practical deployment.” Two of those three priorities sit inside the workforce.

Three Channel Eye figures set the scope of the week:

• 5 contributor articles, all running inside the same week
• 7 sectors the new Jersey law names as Operators of Essential Services
• 3 priorities in the Digital Jersey synthesis (skills, infrastructure, deployment)

The next focus weeks, the publication said, will cover Legal and Professional Services in September and People, Leadership and Work in December. The programme’s editors have sequenced a year that puts implementation, governance and people at the centre.

Cyber Security Becomes a Continuity Question

Cyber Tec opened the week with the argument that cyber security is no longer an IT line item. The piece, posted to Channel Eye alongside the new law’s rollout, framed the change as a shift from guidance to legal duty. The breach picture that frames the law, drawn from the UK Government’s Cyber Security Breaches Survey for 2025/26, is sober: 43% of UK businesses identified a cyber breach or attack in the previous 12 months, and only 25% of all UK businesses have a formal incident response plan in place.

The new Cyber Security (Jersey) Law, approved by the States Assembly in January, gives that gap a legal shape. It establishes the Jersey Cyber Security Centre as the recognised authority for the island, sets expectations for cyber hygiene and incident preparation, and introduces binding duties on Operators of Essential Services across seven sectors: Energy and Utilities, Healthcare, Transport, Telecommunications, Food Supply, Financial Services, and Public Administration and Communication.

The clearest practical change is timing. Operators of Essential Services must notify the Jersey Cyber Security Centre no later than 24 hours after becoming aware of a cyber incident likely to have a significant impact on the continuity of an essential service. The law also sets out what counts as significant, including the number of users affected, how long the incident lasts, and the geographical area affected.

Cyber Tec built the response around what it calls the Five Pillars of Cyber Health:

Pillar	Focus
Preparation	Identifying threats before they strike, agreeing roles and recovery plans
Protection	Multi-factor authentication, access control, strong email security
Detection	Surfacing incidents early enough to act
Response	Notifying the regulator, customers, insurers within the legal window
Recovery	Restoring systems, evidence, and trust

Cyber Tec is one of the UK and Channel Islands’ leading cyber certification bodies, IASME-accredited and NCSC backed. The five pillars are not unique to large Operators of Essential Services. Most SMEs in Jersey will not fall directly under the new law, but the firm’s advice is that the same thinking is useful for any organisation handling sensitive data or serving regulated clients.

The framing of the article is direct. The cyber security strategy “is much more of a business continuity issue than an isolated IT concern.” The legal duty on Operators of Essential Services sits inside a wider commercial shift: larger organisations and regulated businesses are asking their suppliers harder questions about access, backups, incident response and supply chain risk.

From Castle Walls to Data Wherever It Lives

Logiq’s piece, written by director James Hope, took the perimeter model apart. The framing was deliberately blunt. For decades, business leaders were “comforted by a comforting, expensive lie: that if you spend enough money on a big enough digital wall, your business is safe.” The castle-and-moat mental model, the article said, was dismantled years ago by hybrid working, cloud applications and mobile devices.

The replacement Logiq argues for is a Zero Trust framework, distilled into the line never trust, always verify. In practice that means treating every request for access, from the CEO at headquarters or a junior administrator working from home, with the same level of suspicion. The article breaks this into three non-negotiable operational pillars: ruthless identity management with multi-factor authentication and conditional access rules, device health verification before any laptop or phone touches corporate data, and granular data governance with full visibility over the data lifecycle.

Hope’s conclusion inverts a common worry. Tightening controls does not slow the business down. Weak, chaotic infrastructure is what creates friction. A fully hardened, compliant environment lets a business “scale with confidence, adopt new cloud technologies safely, and pass stringent client security audits without scrambling.”

If our perimeter failed entirely this afternoon, how safe is our actual data? If the answer takes more than a few seconds to explain, you already know you have work to do.

That question, attributed to James Hope, Director at Logiq, is the boardroom version of the week’s argument. Logiq is a Jersey-based IT consultancy specialising in cloud, infrastructure, security and digital transformation services for organisations across the Channel Islands and internationally. The firm is positioning itself for the same downstream effects the Cyber Security Law sets up: clients who can no longer rely on the perimeter to do the work for them.

The Skills Gap the AI Industry Is Not Teaching

Marcus Bailey, Head of Cloud within the Technical Solutions team at Prosperity 24/7, used his piece to describe a different cost. The agents now arriving inside Microsoft, Anthropic, Google and OpenAI products, from Scout to Copilot Cowork, are no longer chat boxes. “We are no longer just typing a question and getting an answer,” Bailey wrote. “The newer tools are built to be pointed at a whole piece of work and largely left to it, which only works if someone has set them up properly first.” Setting up means deciding what the tool can see, wiring in the right data, and writing the instructions for how a recurring task should run. That setup is itself a skill, and a harder one than prompt-writing.

Bailey calls this the skills gap, and he is precise about why it is different from earlier waves. Cloud computing changed where systems lived; the first wave of Copilot-style autocomplete changed how fast people could draft. Neither required an ordinary employee to learn how to configure and supervise the system. This wave does. “Tools that change how fast a senior consultant or analyst can think and produce, not just how they file or communicate, are rare,” Bailey wrote, and these are arriving faster than almost any previous technology shift.

The reaction many leaders will reach for, hiring the AI-fluent operator who can already orchestrate the new tools, treats the gap as a recruitment problem when it is mostly a training and investment problem. Skipping that investment, Bailey warned, leaves the skills gap to be decided by “the ones who happen to be curious enough to figure these tools out on their own, while everyone else is left to catch up unsupported, or does not catch up at all.” He closed with three positions a business can be in when the gap has opened up:

1. A business that did nothing and let the skills gap happen by accident
2. A business that hired its way out with a small AI-fluent group and left the rest behind
3. A business that chose, deliberately and with real investment, to bring everyone along

Bailey joined Prosperity 24/7 in 2018 and advises organisations on cloud strategy, infrastructure and digital transformation. The firm, established in 2011, is headquartered in Jersey with offices in Guernsey.

Compliance That Listens for Events, Not the Calendar

KYC360 closed the week with a piece that made a similar argument from inside financial crime compliance. Periodic Know Your Customer reviews, the model in which a customer is onboarded, risk-rated and reviewed again at a fixed interval, are increasingly hard to defend. Beneficial ownership can change overnight. A sanctions, politically exposed person or adverse media alert can redraw the risk profile of a relationship long before the next scheduled review.

The KYC360 argument is that event-driven review replaces the calendar with a continuous monitor. The question moves from “when was this customer last reviewed?” to “what has changed that matters?” A review fires when a material event occurs: an ownership change, a new jurisdiction exposure, an adverse media hit. Low-risk customers stop being recontacted for the sake of the schedule. Higher-risk relationships get attention sooner, with auditors left with a clear trail of actions, approvals and outcomes.

The model fits Channel Islands firms unusually well, because the compliance load here is structurally heavier:

Attribute	Periodic Review	Event-Driven Review
Trigger	Fixed calendar date	Material change in ownership, jurisdiction or screening status

Data view Fragmented across onboarding, screening, transaction and case tools Single, always-current customer record Analyst time Chasing documents and rekeying data for low-risk cases Assessing judgement-based risk on the relationships that moved Audit trail Spread across spreadsheets and email threads Automated, with documented approvals and outcomes

KYC360’s article is explicit that the technology is only part of the answer. “Technology alone will not fix inefficient compliance workflows,” the piece says. “Firms that make this transition successfully tend to address people, process and technology together.” Human oversight stays in the loop for judgement-based decisions. Workflows make clear what happened, when it happened, why the decision was made and who approved the outcome. The customer lifecycle management platform that KYC360 sells is built to sit on top of that operating model, and KYC360 is part of Experian, the global data and technology company.

When AI Edits the Voice but Loses the Writer

Edward & James, the marketing consultancy whose founder James Le Gallez runs Channel Eye’s contributor work on AI in marketing, took the more contrarian of the five slots. The article warned against over-reliance on AI-generated material and argued that expertise, authenticity and human judgement remain essential. The framing was that AI does its best work when it lifts skilled professionals, not when it replaces them.

AI is at its most effective when supporting skilled professionals rather than replacing them.

The argument from Edward & James lines up with the others without ever sharing a paragraph with them. Cyber Tec, Logiq, Prosperity 24/7 and KYC360 each said the same thing in different vocabulary: the technology is already here, and what decides outcomes is the people and processes the organisation puts around it.

From Conversation Phase to Implementation

Tony Moretta’s separate piece for Channel Eye, written as Digital Jersey’s CEO and folded into the same Focus Week, gave the consensus a Jersey-specific frame. “Jersey has spent the past year talking seriously about artificial intelligence,” Moretta wrote. “The next test is whether we can use it seriously.” The three priorities he set out for moving from the conversation phase to adoption and implementation were skills, trusted infrastructure, and practical deployment.

Those three priorities are a near-perfect map of the contributors’ arguments. Cyber Tec covers governance and incident response under the new law. Logiq covers trusted infrastructure in the Zero Trust sense. Prosperity 24/7 covers skills. KYC360 covers practical deployment, the operational shift from calendar-driven reviews to event-driven ones. Edward & James covers the human judgement that decides whether AI-generated work carries any weight at all.

Two further Focus Weeks are scheduled before the end of 2026. September’s Legal and Professional Services week will cover AI in legal practice, legal technology adoption, digital contracts and the future of client relationships. December’s People, Leadership and Work week will look at leadership in a digital world, talent attraction and retention, workplace wellbeing, diversity and inclusion, and the skills needed for the future workforce. The September and December slots will continue the same argument from inside different industries.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Cyber Security (Jersey) Law?

The Cyber Security (Jersey) Law was approved by the States Assembly in January 2026 to give Jersey a formal statutory framework for cyber resilience. It establishes the Jersey Cyber Security Centre as the recognised cyber security authority for the island, sets clearer expectations about cyber hygiene, incident preparation and reporting, and introduces binding legal duties for Operators of Essential Services. The focus is shifting from voluntary guidance to enforceable obligations on the organisations whose services underpin the island’s daily life.

Who counts as an Operator of Essential Services under the new law?

The new Jersey law names seven sectors as carrying Operators of Essential Services: Energy and Utilities, Healthcare, Transport, Telecommunications, Food Supply, Financial Services, and Public Administration and Communication. Most SMEs in Jersey will not fall directly under the law, but they may still feel its effects as larger and regulated clients demand evidence of cyber security controls from their suppliers.

What is Zero Trust in plain terms?

Zero Trust is the model Logiq’s article argues for, distilled into the line “never trust, always verify.” It means treating every request for access, from any user on any device, with the same level of suspicion, and checking identity, device health and data access at every step. The traditional idea of a secure perimeter is replaced with continuous verification of the user, the device and the data being requested.

What is event-driven compliance?

Event-driven compliance replaces fixed-date periodic reviews with continuous monitoring of customer records. Under the model KYC360 argues for, a review fires when a material event occurs (an ownership change, a sanctions alert, a new jurisdiction exposure) rather than when the calendar says the next review is due. Low-risk customers stop being recontacted for the sake of the schedule, and higher-risk relationships get attention sooner, with a clearer audit trail.

Why is the AI skills gap different this time?

Marcus Bailey of Prosperity 24/7 argues the gap is different because the tools have changed shape. Earlier waves, cloud computing and Copilot-style autocomplete, did not require an ordinary employee to learn how to configure and supervise the system. Agentic tools do: setting them up means deciding what they can see, wiring in the right data and writing the instructions for recurring tasks. Skipping that investment, Bailey warns, leaves the gap to be decided by whoever is curious enough to figure the tools out on their own.