CEO View

Risk, decision making and opportunity in a twilight world

Seizing opportunity in 2027 will require unprecedented speed, specificity and accuracy in decision making, both at the strategic and tactical levels. Control Risks is forecasting a year that blends new, AI-driven digital and physical risks with extreme climate events and geopolitical turbulence. These will intensify threats to infrastructure and supply chains, challenging business to seek new frontiers of opportunity. To thrive in such a world, executive teams will need to work together in new ways. Success will come from combining human and technological excellence in a resilient culture that places people at the center.

Don’t play it too safe

That’s a steep climb to open with, and despite the challenges, I really urge businesses to look at the coming year positively. The film director, Christopher Nolan says : “The biggest risk of all is to play it safe.” Nolan and I are very different. He doesn’t own a smartphone. I am obsessively connected. He has immense artistic talent while I have very little. But on the matter of risk, we agree. So when Control Risks’ team of global analysts and risk consultants suggested “playing it safe” as one of our Top Risks for business in 2027, it became my favorite.

Nolan makes big bets and leans into risk-based decisions; the consequences for getting it wrong can be significant. In the year ahead, if companies get their decisions wrong, the consequences could be even more painful – for their reputations, assets, people and market value.

The teams I lead at Control Risks share a key characteristic with our most successful clients: an instinct for opportunity in the face of disruption.  Grasping this is what we all have to play for in 2027. 

Nolan’s film Tenet – a relatively small bet compared to his USD 1.8bn Odyssey – may be a helpful guide for the year ahead. This is a movie about advanced weapons that have been suddenly democratized. They allow the user to travel backwards through time. The protagonists meet versions of themselves going the other way with very different agendas. They are intimately interconnected but shockingly misaligned and somehow converge in the end. The analogies come thick and fast.

In 2027, global business will be facing new risks in the physical and digital domains and at their convergence. AI is supercharging the democratization of attack tools, methodologies and pathways, further dispersing capabilities once the domain of advanced nation states. Anthropic’s Mythos model was just the beginning of the challenge for companies in this realm. Meanwhile, in the physical world, the Middle East and Ukraine/Russia conflicts have accelerated and normalized drone technology to the point where drone attacks are the primary concern for physical security teams, even in traditionally benign environments like central and eastern Europe. This transformation will be a primary driver of another of our Top Risks for 2027 – infrastructure as a battlefield – from data centers and information infrastructure to energy and basic utilities such as water. 

Furthermore, in 2027, these risks will manifest without the impetus of sentient threat actors. In Tenet, the protagonist fights a masked assailant in the Oslo freeport who turns out to be himself. In 2027, many companies will discover that the force attacking their critical systems is their own technology. We will see the increasing duality of agency vs accident in AI related risks. Critical systems will be exposed not just to human malevolence but to accidental catastrophe driven by interconnectivity and unprecedented agentic autonomy. These were isolated incidents in 2026, but companies will face them more frequently in the year ahead. 

A world that is increasingly connected and misaligned

That brings us to the second Nolanverse analogy: a world that is increasingly interconnected but increasingly misaligned. This will be a more fundamental challenge for companies and society in general. Supply chains, companies, economies and the world itself will continue to be more interconnected than ever. Competitive pressures will push enterprises to make the most of AI efficiencies. They will seek deeper interconnectivity across their information and operational technology ecosystems within and outside of their own boundaries. Technology related risks have a similarly transcending mirror in climate risk. Both are facing the hottest year to date and will impact unevenly and unpredictably, without regard for borders. And while many have signalled the unravelling of globalization in recent times, trade flows grew considerably in 2026, and the WTO expects trade to expand even further in 2027. So, the likely future is neither seamless globalization nor clean decoupling. It is selective interdependence with companies operating across diverging ecosystems that remain commercially connected but are politically less aligned. 

Great power competition in technology infrastructure is a well documented manifestation of this building lack of alignment. But more broadly, in 2026, our main RiskMap theme was the new rules – no rules world. What we will see in 2027 is its next iteration. 

In the US, the Democratic midterm victory was a seismic shift in American politics. But rather than bringing more alignment, stability and normality to the global business environment, it is likely to increase overall misalignment in 2027. First, companies will feel the whiplash of regulation starting in January. Democrats attribute some of their success to data center backlash and will seek to set strict limitations on infrastructure and regulate AI more broadly. While Democratic legislative victories received the earliest high-profile coverage, the wave of Democratic gubernatorial wins in November are just as consequential and mean an even deeper regulatory and policy inconsistency from state to state and between states and the Federal Government. This US domestic regulatory friction will stand in stark contrast to China's state-backed compute infrastructure build-up. 

Meanwhile, with subpoena power in Congress, Democrats will aggressively pursue corruption investigations to seek accountability but also set the narrative for the 2028 presidential election. This will likely pull in wider politically driven campaigns against sectors and companies that were perceived to have thrived under looser Trump administration policies. 

For his part, Trump – locked out of domestic policy options – will be focused on building his legacy in the foreign policy realm. This could further detach American policy from previous norms on issues such as the Middle East conflict, Russia/Ukraine, regime change in Cuba, the status of the Panama Canal or potentially the US relationship with China and Taiwan. So, in short, companies will find themselves newly constrained, exposed and regulated as a result of the blue tsunami, but they will still be left trying to predict what Trump might do next within an even more freewheeling and personally driven foreign policy agenda.

In late 2026, the US and Brazil lurched away from right wing populism, as did Serbia and earlier Hungary, in Europe. But as we look forward to elections in 2027, a number of other countries may be moving towards it – again further exacerbating this global lack of alignment and placing global companies squarely in the middle of a fragmented and contradictory set of global systems. But there is a common thread, and it is public anger – at governments, prices, climate inaction, fiscal constraints, inequality, the lack of youth job prospects and perceived corporate greed. And this is the last point on our alignment challenge. In 2027, we will see citizens continue to express their lack of alignment with institutions – whether at the ballot box, on the streets or on-line, and many corporations will be in the crosshairs.

The human alignment problem of 2027 is also a good transition to the third Tenet analogy: convergence. The risks that we have looked at in this year’s RiskMap are more converged than they have ever been before – reinforcing and enabling each other. Cyber and physical security risks can no longer be seen as separate. Zero-sum geopolitical competition is accelerating the AI reckoning which in turn is putting infrastructure front and center as the battlefield for 2027. And the increasingly volatile climate will inflame geopolitical divisions and social unrest, stress fragile supply chains and make it harder to align human populations within countries or companies. 

Where is the opportunity for international business in 2027?

All this said, it might feel like a long way back to the opportunity side of the equation, but 2027 will present a unique upside for competitive risk-based decision making in business. The companies that succeed in 2027 will not necessarily be the ones that have fewer risk exposures. In fact, much of the ability to create value in the year ahead will be about leaning into risk. But here, one more Tenet analogy: Nolan’s movies are notoriously complex, and there is no way that I could have understood this one without some help. In the same way, in 2027, organizations will need help navigating this twilight world. The benefit of external intelligence, decision support, benchmarking and on-the-ground force multipliers will be profound. Companies will need help seeing around corners, making rapid high-fidelity decisions and then acting on them.  

As traditional markets become more complex, there are frontier markets and domains – Venezuela, the Arctic, space, Syria, quantum computing, and deep sea mining – to pick a few. With the end of the US-dominated order, there are new bilateral relationships and multilateral blocks. The lack of global political and regulatory alignment presents opportunities at the fault lines for smart and focused companies to gain market share against their competitors.

The idea that the biggest risk is to play it safe has never been more apt. As the characters in Tenet keep reminding each other: "What’s happened, happened." There is no rewinding to a calmer era. These risks are systemic not temporary. They are now part of the fabric in which we operate as leaders of global businesses. So, if you are playing it safe, what are you waiting for? 

As I said in my introduction, seizing opportunity in 2027 will require strategic and tactical decisions to execute with unprecedented speed and accuracy. These decisions must be based on high fidelity data and intelligence from trusted sources. AI tools will play a role, but as you will read in another of our Top Risks, critical decisions will still require human insight, validation, and often on-the-ground granular understanding that AI alone cannot provide. Hybrid human-AI operating models will allow companies to act quicker and more decisively in the effort to deploy capital. They will innovate, mitigate risk, enter and exit markets and make strategic pivots faster than their rivals. 

Rethink resilience and never forget the human

The 2027 business context will force companies to look at resilience in new ways. Approaches need to be more flexible than ever. Collective action, external benchmarking, dependency mapping, a multi-disciplinary approach and scenario-based planning will be required for any company hoping to lean into risk. In 2027, resilience will be a strategic capability rather than an insurance policy. 

Nolan is famous for delivering his movies on time and under budget. He attributes this to surrounding himself with people who understand and support what he is trying to do but aren’t afraid to criticize. He has a team that is not afraid to tell him hard truths, and he builds great cultures. In a world full of risk, division, geopolitical upheaval, social disconnection and technology driven disruption, global executives will find that strategic clarity, decisive action and a culture of organizational trust instilled by leadership are more important than ever. Great companies and great teams will thrive.