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How EY can help
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Discover how EY's risk consulting team can help your organization embrace disruption and turn risk into a competitive advantage.
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“The post-pandemic risk environment has become increasingly complex,” says Bill Diaz, CEO, Archer. “Risks now show up everywhere, at any time, often triggering chain reactions. The pace is faster, the effects larger. AI is vital for managing risk in this environment; it’s critical for handling today’s increased volume and complexity, as well as for responding to risks in real time.”
As companies have been buffeted by the volatility of recent years, resilience has become a mantra. But the NAVI risk environment didn’t just bring more risks; it also fundamentally reshaped the nature of risk itself. By the same token, companies need not just more resilience, but different resilience — they need to rethink and reframe what resilience means in a new world of risk.
If the traditional approach to resilience was reactive and limited to safeguarding business continuity, the new approach is equally about being proactive and driving strategic growth. Like any good game plan, this includes both offense and defense. Offense ensures your strategic planning is built on a comprehensive understanding of emerging risks and their strategic impacts. Defense ensures you can maintain fundamental promises in the face of NAVI’s disruptions. The end result? A symbiotic relationship in which strategy becomes resilient, and resilience drives strategic growth.
To achieve this vision, risk management needs to change in three critical ways:
- Companies need the ability to sense and respond to rapidly changing developments in real time.
- Risk functions need to model vast numbers of assessments and scenarios at massive scale as the number of risks, and interconnections between risks, proliferate — and as tail risks once considered low-probability merit more serious consideration.
- Firms need to make failures of imagination a thing of the past at a time when companies are repeatedly caught unawares by external shocks and nonlinear tipping points — as well as the unexpected downstream impacts of interconnected, cascading risks.
These shifts require moving beyond the limitations of human capability; achieving a NAVI-ready Risk function with manual processes alone is all but impossible. So, emerging technologies, and especially AI, become indispensable. AI can reinvent risk management with three game-changing capabilities:
- Speed replaces slow-and-periodic manual processes with rapid-response, real-time automated ones.
- Scale analyzes variables and scenarios in quantities many orders of magnitude beyond human capacity.
- Insight meets the complexity of the NAVI risk environment with advanced analytical capabilities, as well as the potential for overcoming human behavioral biases and blind spots — from confirmation bias and desensitization to cognitive overload and decision paralysis.
But realizing value from the full potential of these capabilities is not a given. Instead, the value you realize depends on how you deploy AI.