On New Year’s Eve 1999, while the world waited to see whether the Y2K bug would knock out computer systems at midnight, Tim Walsh was looking at an apartment near Times Square. “Probably not the smartest place to be if the whole world was gonna come to a stop,” he said. Midnight came and went, nothing happened.
Walsh, now KPMG’s U.S. chair and CEO, doesn’t think AI will end the same way. “I don’t think AI is Y2K,” he told Fortune in an interview ahead of the release of the firm’s 2026 U.S. CEO Outlook and what he described as a plethora of conversations about safety and cyber-risk. “Something’s happening and it’s really, really big.”
