Large businesses are increasingly anxious about disruption, but far less confident that AI will deliver the resilience they are publicly promising, according to new research from Zero100.
The study finds that cybersecurity is the dominant business continuity concern, while expectations for AI-driven transformation remain cautious and misaligned with what their CEOs are pitching to shareholders.
“Despite all the recent fallout from Davos, cybersecurity breaches rank as a much bigger business concern than geopolitical conflict,” says Lauren Acoba, VP, research and advisory services at Zero100. “A major cyber failure can do far more immediate damage than tariffs or trade disputes to company profitability and even entire economies, as last year’s JLR incident in the UK demonstrated. “Furthermore, while CEOs are talking up AI to shareholders as a productivity engine, inside the business the mood is far more guarded. Operations leaders believe in AI’s potential, but they don’t believe the timelines.”
Key takeaways:
· More than one-third of businesses rank a cyber incident as the biggest threat to continuity over the next year (35%), ahead of geopolitical instability (20%), trade policy shocks (16%), and labor disruption (8%).
· Cyber incidents stand out not just as the top concern, but as the fastest-moving shock companies expect to face. Nearly two-thirds (62%) say they can respond to a cyber incident within minutes or hours, compared with disruptions such as tariffs, which take the vast majority of businesses days or weeks to respond to (83%).
· However, opinion is sharply divided among COOs on whether AI will reduce or increase cyber risk (50% say better, vs. 43% say worse), even as a majority believe it will help manage supply shortages (64%) and ease skill gaps (58%).
· Fewer than one in five COOs believe a majority of their company’s AI commitments to shareholders can be delivered on time (17%).
· Just 7% believe agentic systems will fundamentally redesign a majority of workflows within the next two years. The most common view, held by two in five COOs (43%), is that agentic AI will reshape just 11–25% of workflows, pointing to selective deployment rather than wholesale transformation.
· Progress on agentic AI is being slowed by organizational readiness rather than technical limitations. When asked specifically about deploying agentic AI at scale, COOs rated technology infrastructure as the most prepared area (6.2 out of 10), ahead of leadership understanding (6.0), data foundations (5.8), process maturity (5.6), and workforce skills (5.5).
· Keeping costs down matters more than anything else, accounting for nearly a third of COO performance metrics on average (29%), roughly double the weight given to growing revenue (15%) or improving customer service (17%). Longer-term signals such as brand trust barely feature at all, typically accounting for just 8%.
