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Why operational resilience depends on a Minimum Viable Enterprise

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8 minute read 16 Oct 2026

Facing new threats enabled by frontier AI, companies must orient their plans around the promises they must keep, even on their worst day.

In brief
  • Headlines today spotlight how AI agents can inflict automated and multifaceted attacks, raising concerns about massive disruption to day-to-day business.
  • The Minimum Viable Enterprise concept asks what commitments a business must fulfill and how it can do so under extreme constraints, whatever crisis occurs.
  • Complementing traditional disaster recovery measures, such efforts uncover hidden dependencies and are refined through tabletop exercises.

Organizations have long been required to confront risk, but frontier AI introduces a level of speed and surprise that felt incomprehensible only a short time ago. A recent round of frontier AI models has executives fearing the worst: a complex cyber attack that penetrates and devastates operations, unfolding so quickly that mitigation efforts lag behind the impacts.

How EY can help

  • The EY Enterprise Resilience solution helps organizations navigate disruption with agility — reducing risk and driving long-term value. Learn more.

    Read more

And for many leaders, AI is just one strain of risk among many weighing on executives today, a symptom of the nonlinear, accelerated, volatile and interconnected (NAVI) world. Not only is the likelihood of a cataclysmic, “zero-day” event top of mind but so is the possibility that multiple critical priorities could come into conflict, forcing difficult choices about where limited resources should be directed.

 

As leaders contemplate the impact of a sudden shutdown or full system breach, they are asking more existential questions about their organization’s role in the global economy; the promises it makes to employees, stakeholders, customers and the public; and the difficult trade-offs that may be required to uphold those promises.

Could your organization survive a truly catastrophic event? And, if so, what sacrifices and contingencies would that require?

Answering these questions requires a different lens. The Minimum Viable Enterprise (MVE) starts not from what must be restored but from what can never go dark — the handful of promises the organization cannot break on its worst day and the minimum needed to keep them.

Why now: an era defined by frontier AI and fragmentation

The operating premise has changed. Organizations can no longer plan around the possibility of a machine-speed attack; they must assume one is coming eventually, whether in their own environment or in that of a critical third party.

In July 2026, an AI security company disclosed what it assessed to be the first documented ransomware operation driven end-to-end by an autonomous large language model agent.1 Meanwhile, conventional cyber attacks still continue to cause financial losses, including cascading impacts to the broader community.

Yet cyber risk is only one manifestation of the broader challenges leaders face today. Frontier AI arrives amid a decade already marked by geopolitical conflict, economic upheaval and regulatory shocks. Many organizations have also consolidated platforms, standardized processes and outsourced specialist capabilities to third parties. These choices improve daily performance and may strengthen resilience in some areas, but they can widen risk exposure and make recovery more complex.

Calamities once treated as localized now cascade across systems, providers and markets. An extreme event, such as a missile strike, natural disaster or period of civil unrest, can compromise a distribution hub, a data center, a utility provider or another dependency on which the enterprise relies, forcing operations to restart elsewhere immediately. Operational problems quickly become problems of stakeholder trust and enterprise viability.

Collectively, these trends expose companies not only to more risk but also to the possibility that disruptions can have broader, more costly and longer-lasting consequences than ever before. This risk landscape may also force leaders to confront a difficult reality: In the event of severe disruption, not every priority can be addressed simultaneously, and difficult trade-offs may be required.

How MVE is defined

What is the smallest version of an enterprise that can keep its most fundamental promises under extreme constraint? And how can those promises be prioritized above all else?

How EY can help

The MVE provides a practical way to answer these difficult questions. Similar to the product development term “Minimum Viable Product,” which represents the absolute basic features needed to bring a product to market, MVE asks what commitments must be upheld by an organization when faced with extreme disruption.

 

While the threat posed by frontier AI creates immediate urgency, MVE is not about one technology or threat. Rather, it gives leaders a practical way to prepare for any disruption that could place the organization’s defining commitments at risk.

 

As its lodestar, MVE begins with the promise of a business: the value it creates for the world and the value it receives in return. By definition, it is bound to the trust that an organization has with its stakeholders, and how that trust manifests in the bottom line. A promise can be:

  • To keep emergency calling functional (for a telecom provider)
  • To ensure that workers receive their paychecks on time (for a payroll and HR company)
  • To provide food and goods that meet safety and regulatory requirements (for a consumer company)
  • To deliver reliable electricity to critical health and hospital infrastructure (for a utility company)

Organizations then can dissect these promises — identifying the dependencies that underpin them — to clarify priorities and craft the MVE. We assess these dependencies through five lenses:

  1. Process and governance: When is it time to move into an MVE operating mode, and what processes are triggered when it happens?
  2. People and organization: Who has the authority to act? Which roles, skills and institutional knowledge are needed to keep the priority commitment?
  3. Technology and data: What system, information and communication channels are required to continue operating at a minimum?
  4. Facilities and equipment: Which physical locations, assets and alternative operating methods must remain available?
  5. Supply chain and third parties: Which external partners are necessary? What do they depend on? Can they operate when the primary route fails? Which distribution partners and alternative fulfillment methods are needed to keep priority orders and transactions moving to customers?

These questions recognize that the sharpest way to build an MVE is to run it in reverse: start from the outcomes the enterprise cannot tolerate and work back to address the single points of failure that could cause them. To maintain the health of financial markets, the European Central Bank followed a similar approach in its 2026 reverse stress-test of more than 100 banks, asking these financial institutions “to identify plausible geopolitical scenarios that would be severe enough to materially affect their capital positions.”2 Management actions had to be described, including raising capital, selling business lines, reducing costs and adjusting payout ratios.

MVE expands upon the traditional resilience concepts of business continuity planning (BCP) and disaster recovery (DR), which remain important foundations but draw upon a previous generation of resilience. In today’s NAVI world, recovery may not happen quickly enough to protect the enterprise’s most critical commitments. MVE takes BCP and DR a step further by establishing an operational floor that remains available under extreme constraints, helping the enterprise protect stakeholder trust, prevent enterprise-wide failure and, ideally, avoid recovery from worst-case scenarios.

Getting started with MVE

An MVE requires ruthless prioritization, assuming a zero-sum fight for scarce resources that touches on an enterprise’s risk appetite, values and core business commitments. Difficult choices must be made without getting bogged down in organizational politics. The EY approach is intended to build on what executives have already created, add clarity, expose hidden dependencies and pressure-test the plan before a crisis exposes its weaknesses.

Key actions to take to get started

Bring together senior leaders to identify the promise. This includes the commitments that cannot be compromised without threatening safety, regulatory standing, customer trust, market confidence or the organization’s ability to continue operating. And leaders must determine the minimum acceptable level of delivery for those commitments, such as by operating at reduced capacity or temporarily deferring nonessential work. These are difficult conversations that require executives to zero in on what matters most, and they should be guided by sector insights that help identify the most viable paths forward.

How EY can help

Map the critical dependencies across the five focus areas. Those are process and governance, people and organization, technology and data, facilities and equipment, and supply chain and third parties. Initially, zero in on the dependencies in which failure would have the greatest impact on the organization’s priority promise.

 

Build on what already exists. Organizations should leverage current BCP, DR and related resilience initiatives and make risk-based investment decisions that support the promise.

 

Pressure-test the first cut MVE. Genuine test-to-fail tabletop exercises or simulations are a must, helping reveal hidden dependencies and weaknesses to be remediated. IT, crisis communications, legal and other functions must respond to an event according to an MVE: What are the tech decisions if systems are breached or shut down? Do regulators need to be notified? Could personal data be leaked? Can functions globally communicate effectively and in a timely manner?

 

Focus on the “how” of MVE as much as the “why.” When it’s time to move quickly, the actions an organization takes will matter more than what it learned from analyses or tabletop exercises alone. While those activities build awareness and confidence, the strategy must ultimately be operationalized through resilience testing. Organizations that fail to make that transition (a common challenge for many) risk admiring their problems and settling for a false sense of security.


Questions about operational resilience and Minimum Viable Enterprise

Summary 

Frontier AI and other fast-moving threats can overwhelm traditional response plans and put an organization’s essential commitments at risk. A Minimum Viable Enterprise (MVE) complements business continuity and disaster recovery by defining the smallest version of an organization that can still uphold its most important promises under extreme constraints. Leaders identify what cannot fail; map the people, processes, technology, facilities and third parties required to sustain it; and pressure-test the resulting plan. The MVE creates an operational floor that protects stakeholder trust when normal operations and full recovery are not possible.

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