AI and Cybersecurity Are the Biggest Challenges, According to a New Riskonnect Survey
The economy is unstable, geopolitical tensions are rising, and there is a shortage of skilled workers. However, a recent Riskonnect poll indicates that cybersecurity is the biggest risk driver.
AI-related worries are also growing. AI increases the hazards of everything in its path by permeating geopolitics, cybersecurity, and many other fields. As a result of their own AI boost, hackers are conducting increasingly complex assaults.
Are risk management methods and strategies ready to meet the demands of this new risk generation?
In order to determine if risk management playbooks are prepared for this unexplored area, Riskonnect polled more than 200 risk, compliance, and resilience experts globally on the major challenges of our day.
According to the 2024 New Generation of Risk Report, there are still significant gaps in risk management initiatives, even if the top worries have changed in the last year. According to the statistics, risk management is becoming more and more recognized as a strategic role; nonetheless, to stay up with the ever-evolving risk landscape, ongoing investment is required.
Leading Risk Factors
72% of respondents, or nearly three-quarters, stated that cybersecurity threats are significantly or seriously affecting their company. This is a significant increase over the poll conducted last year, when ransomware and security breaches were placed first by 47% of respondents.
Economic risks (59%), talent risks (53%), political risks (37%), and third-party/nth-party risks (37%), completed this year’s top five risk drivers.
It seems sense to be concerned about cybersecurity. Ransomware, phishing, and deepfakes are among the growing cybersecurity risks driven by AI. Almost 25% of those surveyed stated that these dangers will most likely affect their companies in the upcoming year.
Risks of Generative AI Are Mostly Ignored
Only 8% of respondents feel ready for the hazards associated with AI and AI-governance, despite the growing usage of generative AI. The majority of businesses (80%) lack a specific strategy to deal with the dangers associated with generative AI, and the majority (65%) lack regulations to control how partners and suppliers utilize generative AI.
According to the majority of respondents (59%) their leadership does not have explicit plans and strategies in place to actively promote generative AI efforts. Risk management teams are now rarely asked to comment on organizational choices pertaining to artificial intelligence. The absence of personnel training and equipment regarding generative AI hazards, including when and why to notify the risk department, may be the cause of this.
Effective risk management can be hampered by a lack of top-level involvement and training, but an inadvertent lack of executive support may also exist. It’s possible that senior leaders are unaware of these threats any more than the general public.
Positively, the data suggests that AI is viewed as a tool to assist risk management teams in doing their duties more effectively rather than as a replacement for workers. Because of AI, just 5% of respondents intend to cut back on their risk management, compliance, or resilience staff.
Spreadsheets Continue to Be Popular
Many responders seem to be clinging to spreadsheets despite the emergence of generative AI and other technologies. The majority of respondents (53%) stated that they manage risk primarily or exclusively using spreadsheets. Over 25% of respondents claimed to use spreadsheets exclusively.
Spreadsheets frequently have data integrity problems because of their drawbacks, which include manual entry, a lack of data safeguards, and out-of-sync versioning. Just 21% of respondents claimed to be highly confident in the precision and usefulness of their risk data. The majority of businesses stated that their data’s timeliness, accuracy, and breadth have some shortcomings. 16% of respondents claimed that their data was completely unreliable.
Forty percent of businesses estimate they will have invested in some risk management solutions within a year. Twenty percent think they will have specialized risk software that is connected with other organizational functional areas, and a quarter say they will have implemented contemporary risk management software. Nevertheless, 16% stated that they would stick to using spreadsheets only.