A New Era of Resilience: Aon’s Global Risk Management Survey

In this episode of On Aon, Joe Peiser, CEO of Commercial Risk, and Richard Waterer, Global Risk Consulting Leader, unpack the major findings from Aon’s 2025 Global Risk Management Survey — and what Risk Management leaders can do to remain resilient in the face of increasingly systemic and interconnected risks.

They explore the critical role of analytics in understanding evolving threats and highlight three traits that distinguish highly resilient organizations: insight, agility and collaboration.

Key Takeaways:

1. Many of the top risks in Aon’s Global Risk Management Survey are broad and interconnected, impacting multiple areas of business.
2. Cyber Risk remains the top concern globally. The rapid adoption of AI is intensifying risk complexity. Artificial Intelligence is itself a top 10 future risk.
3. A persistent gap exists between risk awareness and action. Organizations, need better data and analytics to build accurate risk profiles.
4. Resilient organizations are those that can quantify exposures, optimize capital allocation and embed risk strategy into decision making.

Experts in this episode:

• (Host) Joe Peiser, CEO, Commercial Risk at Aon
• Richard Waterer, Global Risk Consulting Leader at Aon

Key moments:

(1:12) The top 10 risks in our 2025 Global Risk Management Survey had some surprising and not-so-surprising results. Cyber Risk and Increasing Competition continue to rank highly, while Geopolitical Volatility made a significant jump.

(4:14) The risks cited are systemic and interconnected. Their impact is widespread and can be felt across the company.

(8:37) Highly resilient companies need three things to set themselves apart — insight, agility and collaboration.

Additional Resources:

Findings from Aon’s Global Risk Management Survey

5 Ways to Position Risk Capital as a Value Driver

AI and Workforce Skills: Who Should Act and Why Now?

5 Top Trends for Risk Capital in 2025

Soundbites:

Joe Peiser:

“Business leaders can't simply manage more risk by intuition. They really need the tools and the insights from those tools to interpret today's landscape and make decisions that help them survive and thrive.”

Richard Waterer:

“We were surprised to see Attracting and Retaining Top Talent fall out of this year's top 10. When you consider the challenges being brought about by workforces today, for example, healthcare costs in North America, new legislation on pay transparency in EMEA, you can understand why talent is a complex and costly issue for leaders.