Beazley’s 2024 Risk & Resilience research reveals that while technology offers significant opportunities and benefits, it also presents new and heightened risks for business leaders, many of whom are unprepared for the current and future landscape.
Executive Summary
Our survey of global business leaders reveals that generative artificial intelligence (AI) is seen as a ‘friend’ and ‘foe’.
Key insights from the report include:
- 27% are concerned about tech obsolescence risk in the face of new technologies (such as AI), rising to 28% by 2025. And 25% believe the threat posed by disruptive technologies is the top risk they face in 2024.vii
- The speed of adoption of AI technologies is also reflected in our research data, with one in four (25%) of the firms we surveyed planning to invest in AI this year to improve their firm’s resilience to risk, and 68% believe AI will lead to jobs being replaced in their company in 2024.i
- Concern over AI, tech disruption and intellectual property (IP) risk appears to be creating something of a blind spot to cyber risk, with the percentage of executives ranking cyber risk as their top concern declining from 34% at the height of the ‘ransomware pandemic’ in 2021v to 26% now. This stands in stark contrast to the reality of today’s cyber risk landscape.
- With cyber crime ‘kill chains’ becoming increasingly sophisticated and harder to pre-empt, misinformation is a significant risk factor, and with new regulations on the cards, boardrooms need to be on the front-foot, ready to manage cyber and tech risks as they evolve.
By gaining greater visibility with threat intelligence, building resilience strategies that pre-empt these risks, and creating a response plan in case of a cyber attack, businesses will have in place an effective cyber defence.
Preparednessii for cyber risk has dropped from 80% in 2022v to 75% this year.
Nearly a quarter (24%) of the executives we surveyed are planning to invest in their cyber security risk management.
As we saw with the CrowdStrike IT outage in July, businesses need to remain nimble so that they can move quickly to identify vulnerabilities and patch systems when issues arise.
The insurance industry has an important role to play in helping firms navigate today’s evolving cyber and tech risk landscape. By leveraging the vast amounts of claims, incident, and threat information data we have and translating this insight into actionable guidance and elevated resilience for a range of cyber and tech risks, we can help our clients to better mitigate risk.
The information set forth in this document is intended as general risk management information. It is made available with the understanding that Beazley does not render legal services or advice. It should not be construed or relied upon as legal advice and is not intended as a substitute for consultation with counsel. Although reasonable care has been taken in preparing the information set forth in this document, Beazley accepts no responsibility for any errors it may contain or for any losses allegedly attributable to this information. BZ CBR 119.”
[i] ‘Somewhat agree’ and ‘Strongly agree’ answers combined.
[ii] ‘Moderately prepared’ and ‘Very prepared’ answers combined.
[v] This figure is based on research undertaken in January 2022 with 2,000 executives of firms based in the UK, US, Canada and Singapore of varying sizes, operating in 10 broad industry sectors with international operations
[vii] This year’s survey was undertaken between 05.01.2024 and 15.01.2024 with 3,500 executives based in the UK, US, Canada, Singapore, France, Germany and Spain of varying sizes, operating in 9 broad industry sectors with international operations.
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