Artificial intelligence is buzzing in every area of business right now, including the practice of business continuity.

Advances in natural-language voice processing generation – like ChatGPT – alongside AI engines capable of learning, could lead to significant changes in business continuity management.

AI is already writing emails, helping with schedule optimization, and creating presentations. These are all value-adding applications of AI power. For the business continuity profession, AI offers the power to streamline and augment everyday activities. Here are some of the near-term implications.

What is Generative AI?

Mainstream solutions like ChatGPT and Google’s Bard scrape massive amounts of information from the internet to learn and replicate human language delivery. When prompted, generative AI solutions can apply learned patterns to produce high-quality text, graphics, and videos in a matter of seconds. Technology has advanced quickly, and many companies have begun to incorporate its capabilities into their solutions.

But generative AI isn’t limited to just information regurgitation, and you don’t need a clever mind to take advantage of its power.

6 Ways You Can Use Artificial Intelligence for Business Continuity

1. The Business Impact Analysis

Much of the business impact analysis is about identifying and documenting relationships. Products and services are mapped to processes, processes to resources (locations, information, data, IT services, raw materials, services, equipment, etc.) and processes to third parties. The BIA also helps identify potential impacts associated with downtime. 

Imagine generative AI using private inputs and publicly available information to help you document these dependencies and potential impacts. 

Not only would this be an incredible time-saving opportunity, but it could also radically improve the completeness of the BIA — and even call out critical vulnerabilities such as single points of failure and dependencies without recoverability.

2. Identifying Strategies and Documenting Plans

If you’ve ever spent hours parsing through information from your business impact analysis to pull important details and create or update business continuity plans, you’re not alone. Generative AI can help speed the process and identify strategies to respond and recover. By simply prompting generative AI solutions to compose a business continuity plan for a certain process, asset or disruption type, you’ll instantly receive a sample plan that you can build from. Imagine a world where your role – and that of the business – shifts from creating multiple plan drafts to performing more of a quality assurance function.  In addition to saving time, you could come away with a fresh perspective on options to respond and recover.

3. Tracking Active and Potential Threats

Anyone employed by a large global organization with complex supply chains can appreciate the challenge of building an early-warning system to notify the right people about potential threats so they can take action.

If you have a solid understanding of your passive and active threat landscape (threat intelligence), you’re better poised to preempt and/or respond to a disruption early, before it results in significant impact.

It’s next to impossible for an individual or team to continually track risks by hand. AI solutions can quickly gather data from a variety of sources – such as news feeds, social media, and government websites – and filter through the noise to notify the right people. Investing in an AI-powered threat intelligence solution will greatly increase your situational awareness and response times, thereby increasing overall resilience.

4. Developing Exercise Scenarios

Somewhat related to risk and threat intelligence, generative AI can help identify plausible scenarios that could significantly impact your organization, the market in which it operates, or your customers’ use of your products and services. You then can use this information for exercise scenarios. 

AI can further refine teamwork and critical analytic skills by developing challenges and injects for participants to consider for improving teams, strategies, plans and overall resilience.

5. Crafting Crisis Communications

Generative AI is best known for its Natural Language Processing (NLP) capability that enables it to understand and mimic human language. NLP can come in handy when you need to craft important internal or external communications during a crisis event. For example, try asking ChatGPT to “write an internal corporate communication email related to hurricane response,” and it will instantly spit out a well-crafted email with advice for your employees.

Here are some additional prompts you can try:

  • “Write a corporate communication warning of a potential cybersecurity threat.”
  • “Write a public social media communication from a company related to a technical outage.”
  • “Write a 250-character statement notifying customers that our business location is closed due to disruption.”
  • “Write a 250-character statement for a corporate power outage alert.”

Using these tools to draft templates sets you one step ahead when every moment matters. Most solutions will also indicate areas in the output where it recommends you include more detail, so the final product is tailored to your company or situation.

If you prefer not to use AI for crafting your communications, you can also ask it to proofread written copy and provide suggestions for enhancing clarity and readability.

6. Third/Fourth-Party Risk Management

Managing the risk of disruption brought on by third parties is challenging enough. What about fourth parties, meaning your third parties’ suppliers? It’s almost shocking how much information is publicly available regarding the relationship between third- and fourth-party suppliers, and AI offers the promise of connecting the dots to better assess risk.

Harness this power to better understand your fourth-party dependencies, where they operate from, and the many threats they face.

Generative AI offers one of the first solutions to begin solving this complex, elusive, and intimidating problem that’s plagued businesses for decades.

The Importance of Human Review

While AI is powerful, there is still need for your professional skills alongside its abilities. AI may lack the personal touch, empathy, and urgency that you need in business continuity. It also has the potential for errors, false information, or inaccuracies. Consider AI as a way to jump-start your task. You still need to refine the outcome. Threats need to be validated by humans for authenticity, and communications should be reviewed and aligned to your culture or style.

Your data is also important. Asking ChatGPT to write a business continuity plan does nothing without the details surrounding your organization’s important business processes and resources. Take the time to personalize the general format AI so the output is valuable and actionable for your business. However, be careful with the information you do share with free resources like ChatGPT. Do not release personal, private, or business-critical information externally.

AI should not replace the great work that you do. Keep in mind that your involvement and expertise should always be the final gateway. Never let anything go unchecked.

Don’t Wait to Innovate

AI is advancing every day, and you don’t want to get left behind. These are just a few of the ways you can use AI to your advantage now, with the promise of even more in the future.

Start simple, explore what’s new, and discover what works best for your program. The more you learn, the better prepared you’ll be to ride the artificial intelligence innovation wave.

Are you prepared to handle the risk of artificial intelligence? Download Riskonnect’s The New Generation of Risk report to discover the new threats that 300 risk and compliance professionals worldwide are facing.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Brian Zawada

Brian Zawada brings more than 25 years of experience managing and building world-class, global business continuity programs to his role as VP of strategy for Riskonnect. Outside of his work with Riskonnect and its clients, Zawada previously served as head of the U.S. delegation to ISO Technical Committee 223, the authors of ISO 22301. Zawada contributed to the development of ISO 22317 and ISO 22331. In 2020, he published his first book, “The Business Continuity Operating System.” Zawada is also a two-time lifetime achievement award winner from CIR and the BCI.

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