The hottest year is coming for us all
Extreme heat will intensify pressure on infrastructure, supply chains and food security. Explore how organisations can adapt and build resilience.
In 2027 humankind will mark its fifth year living with mainstream generative AI. While it has become increasingly pervasive across societies, governments are no closer to governing it effectively. Competition between the US and China for frontier capability and between everyone else for access is no closer to easing. Societies are still deciding how to manage perceived risks to jobs, security, and truth itself. The coming year is set for accelerating AI advancement to collide with rising resistance and unease about its consequences.
Share of adults who used a generative AI product in 2026
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This collision will drive the following risks for organisations:
Evolving threats in a regulatory vacuum
In 2027, the scale, speed and autonomy of agents will grow exponentially. Individuals, organisations and governments will deploy these agents into critical processes from financial payments to system maintenance, despite the growing risks of unintended action. Threat actors, from nation-states to individuals, will deploy agentic capabilities that let them scale attacks while compressing the time and resources required to run them.
Autonomous agents will encounter and interact with one another with little to no human visibility. The likelihood of agent-on-agent manipulation will rise sharply.
Governments will not be in control and organisations should not expect a major incident to change this. Coordinated safeguards have often followed disasters, but global competition around AI and the fundamentally distributed nature of digital space make a coordinated, globally applicable, regulated response impossible.
Changing economics
Agents consume computing resources continuously and at scale; falling unit prices conceal rising total spend. Organisations will find that core processes now run on a variable cost set by a handful of providers, on infrastructure those organisations do not own, and that providers can reprice, restrict, or withdraw at will. The same demand is driving the data centre build-out that follows, and the capital behind it assumes that demand holds. If it does not, consolidation or provider failure becomes an existential risk for every organisation built on top of them.
Social backlash
Unease about the impact of AI and emerging technology adoption will increase. Anti-AI activism, driven by concerns about power, water, noise, and land, will stay local and uncoordinated but will move beyond permitting fights and protest to direct action against the infrastructure AI depends on. In regions such as Europe and the Middle East, where state-on-state conflict endures, activist campaigns will provide convenient cover for state-proxy sabotage, drawing data centres and the energy systems behind them into military confrontation well beyond the frontline. And even though data on the impact of AI on employment is not conclusive yet, concerns will grow about AI leading to displacement and replacement by robotic systems, which surpassed 5 million global installations in 2025. AI may eventually fuel productivity growth and job creation, but – like earlier transformative technologies – there will be a lot of creative destruction along the way. Societies are not ready for the prospective disruption of long-standing social compacts and political bargains.
Levels of excitement and nervousness about AI products and services
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What to do
Organisations will not be able to set the pace of AI development or the technology’s regulation. They can decide how much of its downside they are prepared to absorb by addressing five areas now:
- Treat agents as privileged insiders within their networks and as possible adversaries outside of their networks
- Review liability before an incident occurs
- Map dependencies on capabilities they do not control
- Secure physical infrastructure as much as digital
- Prepare for a global incident with no global support
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Explore the changing global risk landscape
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A leadership perspective on 2027
Control Risks CEO Bill Udell looks beyond the individual risks to consider what they mean collectively for leaders making decisions in an increasingly complex global environment, and how businesses can prepare for what comes next.
Work with us
Explore what the RiskMap outlook means for your markets, investments, operations, people and strategic priorities with our experts. From a bespoke briefing to specialist advice, our strategic intelligence and security teams can help you understand your exposure, and make confident business decisions.
