April Fool’s Day is a tradition that I usually find immensely irritating, but this year I looked at it from an entirely different perspective.

Everyone knows that April Fool’s Day is the 1st April, every year, for the last several centuries at least, but every year people fall for it. You’ve only got to read some of the outraged comments across social media to see that people react emotionally before questioning what they are seeing.

It really got me thinking, if people can fall for this every year without fail, it’s kind of like a national stress-test for critical thinking. People's default mode is belief, not scrutiny. We process information to understand it, not to question it. Doubt requires effort, but acceptance is automatic.

If this happens with content that is deliberately labelled as a prank by culture and calendar, what happens with AI deepfakes that carry no such signal? The same people scrolling and sharing and reacting without pausing - they're in your teams, they're handling your communications, your procurement, your client relationships.

For business leaders, this is not an abstract concern. The same cognitive shortcuts that make someone share an outraged comment under a prank - believe first, check never, are the same shortcuts that lead to fraudulent payments authorised on a cloned voice call, to confidential information shared with a convincing impersonator or to reputational damage from content nobody verified.

We built organisations and society on the assumption that information could be trusted at face value but that assumption no longer holds.

Skills like media literacy, AI awareness, and a culture of pause-before-you-act aren't soft skills. In 2026, they're operational essentials for AI risk management.

April Fools Day reminded me of that this year. Unexpectedly.