Geopolitical crisis consulting has become ever more important for corporations as global instability and disruption loom large.CSA-Printstock/Getty Images
Not long after GardaWorld announced a $14 billion recapitalization in March 2025, the Montreal-based security behemoth’s intelligence division, Crisis24, unveiled a partnership with Palantir Technologies offering corporate clients “unprecedented actionable foresight” on everything that’s going sideways in our crisis-addled world. For all the obvious reasons, central banks and institutional investors are urging market players to keep their heads up and eyes open. As Nicolai Tangen, CEO of Norway’s US$2 trillion-plus sovereign wealth fund, told Bloomberg recently, instability these days is “always the kind of things that you don’t expect, and which are not in your scenarios.” The unknown unknowns.
No surprise, then, that geopolitical crisis consulting has become ever more salient and salable — a bespoke service offered by global accounting firms, investment giants like Blackrock and specialized consultancies with names like Stratfor and CanongateAI. Artificial intelligence, of course, looms large, both as a driver of geopolitical disruption and as a tool that purportedly allows these advisers to generate granular risk assessments.
Some multinationals have fashioned their own AI-based risk observatories, while others turn to providers like Crisis24, which employs more than 200 risk intelligence analysts. “Organizations aren’t just looking for information at a time like this,” says Sally Llewellyn, vice-president, global intelligence. “They want insight they can act on, whether that’s a decision about moving people, pausing operations or timing a response. We’re supporting clients with scenario-based assessments, exposure analysis and concrete guidance on things like travel viability, border movements, airspace risk and access to medical care.”
Investors bet on stability after Trump-Xi summit as Iran war concerns linger
Yet, the business of predicting risk can be ... risky. Crisis24’s Global Risk Forecast 2026, for instance, contained this banger in a section on “escalation” in Iran: “A sustained effort to block the Strait of Hormuz remains an unlikely worst-case. Nearly one-fifth of global oil and gas passes through the waterway each day, so any disruption would destabilize energy markets, raise insurance premiums, and increase shipping costs. Such a move would also severely harm Iran’s own economy.” Turns out that’s a risk Iran and the U.S. were willing to take.
So the question is, in a world buffetted by climate change, great-powers competition, AI acceleration, peek-a-boo tariffs, a capricious president, supply chain upheavals and pandemics, how should companies and boards manage risk when the advice market is so crowded?
Certainly, professional prognosticators are trying to figure out how AI can be pressed into service to surface and then track latent sources of risk. The AI-GPR Index, for example, developed by the Federal Reserve Board’s senior associate director Matteo Iacoviello and University of Wisconsin researcher Jonathan Tong, uses AI to read newspaper articles and assign daily risk scores based on their geopolitical content.
Yet, the risk problem retains a less empirical valence in the world of corporate governance research. The 40,000-foot view comes from scholars who think deeply about whether traditional managerial and governance approaches—competitive intelligence, resilience planning and foresight—retain their relevance in the midst of a Category 4 hurricane.
Many experts argue that boards and risk mitigation teams can’t afford to react to every explosion, but rather should cleave to organizational principles such as flexibility as a means of navigating choppy seas.
Khalil Dindarian, a Siemens business strategy executive and author of Embracing the Black Swan: How Resilient Organizations Survive and Thrive in the Face of Geopolitical and Macroeconomic Risks, says companies these days need to “learn quickly and adapt quickly.” He also cites previous poly-crises—9/11, SARS, the 2008 financial crash—and re-frames the problem: “Why have we not learned?”
Sarah Kaplan, professor emerita, strategic management at the Rotman School of Management, wonders, too. “I am hoping companies will take the lesson from the pandemic and take the lesson from now, and not say, ‘Let’s wait until some crisis hits and then hire some consulting firm. Let’s build this into our practices as a board and as a senior leadership.’”
In 2021, at the height of COVID-19, Kaplan and Bay Street veteran Peter Dey published a shot across the bow of corporate Canada, entitled, “360° Governance: Where Are the Directors in a World in Crisis?” The report’s 13 core governance principles offered up a full-throated endorsement of stakeholder capitalism, reminding C-suite execs and directors that accounting for forces outside a company’s immediate operations—from Indigenous rights to climate to diversity—remains the best way to mitigate risk in a world in crisis.
While their work reflected the progressivism that swept through the corporate world at that time (and now feels like a distant memory), Kaplan points to the Iran war’s supply chain disruptions as evidence that such lessons very much hold up. “I’m not sure I’d change too many of the recommendations,” she says. “Our sense at that time, and my sense still at this moment, is that corporate Canada is very far behind on their ability to accommodate these kinds of issues.”
The Iran war’s supply chain disruption is evidence that companies should account for forces outside their immediate operations as the best way to mitigate risk in a world in crisis, Rotman's Sarah Kaplan says.Reuters
Kaplan and other governance watchers also note that climate change (notwithstanding the Trump administration’s denialism) lurks beneath so much of this moment’s upheaval—not just in the form of metastasizing Middle East wars, but also with the soaring power demands of AI, China’s green energy boom, and the exposure confronting property and shipping insurers. Corporations and boards that fail to account for these externalities are only adding to their risk.
Dindarian adds that for many years, more far-sighted corporations sought to confront external sources of risk and uncertainty by adopting an “enterprise resilience” outlook, which entailed aligning strategy, operations, management systems and governance (a.k.a. everyone rowing in the same direction) in the service of enduring whatever comes along.
But as crisis piles on top of crisis, even this approach will falter. The reason, Dindarian argues, has to do with complexity theory, which sits on top of ambient risk. “Traditional risk management is built on linear processes,” he says. But in a period marked by a proliferation of calamities, the external pressures on companies tend to compound one another, much like the sloshing of waves in a bathtub will amplify exponentially. In such an environment, you never have complete information. “The biggest mistake is trying to enforce security by considering the world to be more predictable than it is,” Dindarian says. “You have to accept uncertainty as part of every decision.” In other words, dealing with the “known unknowns,” as former U.S. secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld infamously put it.
All this looks good on paper, but even the most forward-looking companies still have to make hard choices when confronted by a whirlygig of tariffs, a constipated capital investment climate and supply chains that once again have seized up like an engine with an oil leak. Connie Bonello, Capgemini’s insights and data financial services leader, says many large companies and boards now do detailed scenario planning alongside traditional risk management, like currency hedging. But, she adds, the crisis response window is shrinking because of all the information out there. “The public can find out about something potentially before a board,” says Bonello. “The question is, how do we deal with those situations?”
In the age of Trump, anticipating the worst isn’t wrong-headed and doesn’t even need to be reinforced by AI. Commenting on Crisis24’s botched prediction about the Strait of Hormuz, Kaplan notes that under normal circumstances, Iran was never going to block the shipping lanes. “But risk management right now is very hard because of the Trump factor, and that guy just does whatever he wants,” she says. “You have to model your business plan around the worst risks actually being much more likely than you thought.”