In today’s bulletin, Charlie discusses the webinars that were showcased by the BCI during BCAW and gives an insight into this year’s theme, ‘Empowering Resilience with AI’.
This week, I was asked to write my bulletin on BCAW+R 2025 (Business Continuity & Resilience Awareness Week). With two days dedicated to cyber training and the other two spent preparing for and conducting a major exercise, I haven’t had much opportunity to watch many of the webinars. What I have done is look at the different webinars that have been delivered and the white papers published as part of the week.
According to the BCI’s website, there were 23 webinars delivered over the week, 2 white papers, and a resource published. I am not sure how this compares with previous years, but it shows that there is a strong demand for webinars. The theme of the week was ‘Empowering Resilience with AI’, which is very much the theme of every conference you attend at the moment, whatever the industry. AI is advancing rapidly, changing almost daily, so it is essential that we discuss it and try to understand its relevance to our professions. We all know that AI is going to change our industry and our lives, so we want to comprehend what it means and how it will affect us. We also know that it will create many new jobs, some of which we cannot currently imagine, while many other jobs which we may presently be doing will be automated and no longer required.
There are many predictions that the changes it will bring are as fundamental as the industrial revolutions, when the UK shifted from a rural agrarian society, with humans and horses doing the heavy work, to a city-based, industrial society, with machines taking over that heavy work, creating wealth, new jobs, and a better standard of living for many. I think this is very exciting for all of us, as we are on the cusp of a new AI wave. We must surf this wave, making the most of the opportunity, rather than letting it crash over us and making us victims of the changes brought about by AI.
In looking at who was delivering the webinars, the BCI seems to have a good geographical spread of people, a mixture of academics and practitioners, and many of the people who were delivering the webinars were ones I hadn’t heard of. The BCI is doing a good job at promoting a new and upcoming generation of BC professionals.
I thought it was interesting that the biggest section of the webinar was on the Tuesday, where the theme was ‘AI & Exercises’. Having attended the BCI’s conference last year, the main practical use of AI delivered during the conference was to aid in the development of exercises. Looking at the description of the webinars, BC people using AI have gone from using AI at the conference to create general pictures and videos for running exercises, to using AI to write scenarios and injects. I see one of the very powerful uses of AI is to utilise it as an intelligent, knowledgeable assistant. If you don’t have much experience in managing incidents or being in the BC profession, you may not possess knowledge of different types of incidents, what happened, and how they played out. Now, with AI, you can, within seconds, generate detailed scenarios and the injects that drive the scenario. It can save you days of research, ensuring your scenarios are realistic and that the injects are appropriate. This week, I was conducting a simulated exercise, so we had a large number of injects which were delivered to the exercise players. Where emails were injected, we could use AI to write the email, adding some colour and detail to its content. What used to take 10 minutes per email can now be done in seconds. If you have 70 injects to write, this hugely speeds up the process.
Many practitioners delivering exercises are realising that AI can save them significant amounts of time. It can also provide details that enhance the realism of injects and prompt ideas for additional events and details to incorporate into the exercise.
Monday’s theme, ‘Predictive analytics and forecasting’, along with Wednesday’s on ‘Supply chain and cyber resilience’ and Thursday’s on ‘Embracing organisational resilience through AI’, all appeared interesting, but didn’t have the same number of webinars as the exercise on Tuesday. I got the impression that the webinars on these days were about how different professions are using AI and also how externals, such as nation states and cyber criminals, are using AI, which could have an impact on our organisations.
I was interested to see that there was only one webinar on ‘Success stories showcasing AI applications across industries’, and until I volunteered to contribute, there was none. I thought this was telling, as many people are discussing how AI could be utilised, but not so many are stating, in the BC and resilience space, this is how I am using AI at the moment.
As part of my research for my webinar, I spoke to Ben White of 4C Strategies. He told me about the very exciting things he and 4C were developing and using AI to integrate into their software, allowing the power of AI to enhance the effectiveness and usefulness of an incident within their software. They were building their own incident management model within their software to address the issues of security and the loss of client data to the LLM provider. Fusion, the BC software people, whom I see from numerous LinkedIn posts are doing something similar within their software, but I can’t comment too much as their person developing this aspect, who shall remain nameless, has not yet answered my email request for a chat!
So, in conclusion, I think AI is slowly making its way into the BC community, and more and more people are finding BC uses for it, with the greatest penetration in exercises. I spoke to a crisis communications practitioner the other day as part of the Emergency Planning Society Crisis Communications Working Group, and she had become a very recent convert to the use of AI and has embraced it completely. I find the issue with AI is that if you don’t know the uses for it, you might never use it. Therefore, I think BCAW has done a good job of promoting AI and bringing its uses and utility to BC practitioners.
