A silhouette of a human head showing the brain by ParallelVision via Pixabay .
Guadalupe Hayes-Mota is director, bioethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. Views are his own.
This article, "The Brain is the Next Platform—But Many Executives Aren't Ready," originally appeared on Forbes.com and is reprinted with permission.
In 2021, a paralyzed man typed roughly 90 characters per minute using only his thoughts. Three years later, Neuralink put a chip in a human skull and investors went wild. Both moments got covered as medical breakthroughs.
However, I would argue that they were also the opening moves of a major platform shift—perhaps the biggest one since the smartphone. And executives who are still treating neurotechnology as a futurist talking point are making the same mistake their predecessors made with the internet in 1996: confusing distance with safety.
What Neurotechnology is Changing
Every major tech wave has forced a reckoning with human capability. The PC changed how we processed information. The internet collapsed geography. The smartphone made attention the currency of commerce. But neural interfaces don't upgrade your tools. They could potentially upgrade—or monetize—you.
The clinical progress here is well past the PowerPoint stage. Over 700,000 people worldwide have cochlear implants. A Stanford-led study published in Nature in 2023 enabled a woman with ALS to communicate through a brain-to-text interface at speeds approaching natural conversation. Synchron is scaling a minimally invasive neural implant delivered through blood vessels—no open-brain surgery required.
These aren't conference demos. They involve operating rooms, FDA approvals and people whose lives have been measurably transformed.
The commercial frontier is moving just as fast. EEG headsets from companies like Emotiv can already measure cognitive load and mental fatigue. Companies in industries like mining are actively evaluating these tools to cut accidents driven by exhaustion. And Kernel is building noninvasive brain-measurement systems at a resolution previously locked inside hospital walls.
The technology is not waiting for a strategy memo.
Understanding the new Data Risk
Most major privacy crises of the past decade have involved behavioral data—what people searched, what they bought or where they went. Neural data is a different animal entirely. It could potentially capture what people feel, intend or experience, sometimes before they act on it at all.
Brain signals can reflect stress, attention states and, in certain cases, early signs of neurological disease. They are generated continuously and often involuntarily. And here's the part that should concern your general counsel: inference risk. The signals captured for one purpose may enable conclusions the user never agreed to disclose—and in many jurisdictions, there is currently nothing stopping that from happening.
HIPAA protects health data held by providers and insurers. It says nothing about the data generated by an EEG headset worn on a warehouse floor. GDPR covers personal data broadly but doesn't treat neural signals as the extraordinary category they are.
In 2021, Chile became the first country to amend its constitution to recognize mental privacy as a protected right. Colorado explicitly included neural data in its privacy law in 2024. But these are outliers. In most markets, you can deploy brain-monitoring technology and operate in a legal gray zone—one that will most likely not stay gray.
The Coercion Problem Nobody Puts in the Deck
Here is an example of the ethical exposure that almost never makes it into investor presentations:
Picture a logistics company deploying fatigue-monitoring headsets for long-haul drivers. The safety rationale is real. Participation is technically voluntary. And yet, drivers who decline are perceived as statistically higher risk. That perception shapes their route assignments, their advancement, their standing.
Nobody says it out loud. Nobody has to. The pressure is rarely explicit. Workplace monitoring systems often operate within structural power imbalances, and research shows that the data they collect can feed directly into performance evaluations and disciplinary decisions—meaning participation can carry real professional consequences for workers.
The stakes get higher when cognitive enhancement enters the picture. If augmentation tools demonstrably improve performance—faster decisions, better focus, fewer errors—declining them may eventually become professionally untenable. The line between voluntary adoption and de facto requirement doesn't require a policy change to disappear. In my experience, it tends to quietly erode under competitive pressure until it's simply gone.
There's also a workforce inequality dimension that many organizations haven't begun to price in yet. If augmented cognitive performance becomes the baseline in certain industries, workers without access to the tools will struggle to stay even. They are likely to fall behind in a landscape that has been rebuilt around enhanced competitors.
That's regulatory exposure. That's reputational liability. And in my experience, it tends to surface at the worst possible moment.
What Getting This Right Actually Looks Like
I believe that one of the most important steps companies can take regarding this emerging technology is to act now, without waiting for regulatory clarity first. Treat neural data as categorically sensitive from day one—not because you are forced to, but because you understand that operating this close to the human mind demands a higher threshold of trust than almost any technology before it. In practice, this means:
• Auditing what a device is capable of capturing before you deploy it, not after.
• Building opt-out mechanisms that actually function in the real world, not just on paper.
• Treating networked neural devices as critical infrastructure—with cybersecurity standards to match.
The FDA has already flagged vulnerabilities in implanted cardiac devices that could allow unauthorized external access. A compromised cardiac device can stop a heart. A compromised neural interface could impair someone's cognition, movement or ability to communicate. The risk profile is not comparable to a leaked email list.
Most importantly, adopting this mindset means treating your people as participants in this transition rather than its subjects.
The companies that will define the neurotechnology era aren't necessarily the ones with the most advanced hardware. Instead, I believe it will be those that earn the right to operate in the most intimate domain a human being possesses. That permission doesn't come from a regulator. It's granted—or permanently revoked—by the people you employ and the public you serve.