Q&A: Richard Waterer on Aon's Global Risk Survey

The global risk landscape is defined by interconnected volatility, where climate, cyber and economic threats no longer occur in isolation.

Richard Waterer leads Aon's Global Risk Consulting practice, managing more than 1,500 consultants who help multinational organisations navigate and mitigate these systemic risks.

He has developed strategic frameworks to guide executives through rapid disruption using data-driven insights. His expertise in rare but high-impact events and AI ethics has made him a leading voice in modern risk strategy, helping firms transform global instability into competitive advantage.

Here, he discusses Aon's newly released Global Risk Management Survey.

Tell us a bit about Aon's Global Risk Management Survey

Aon’s Global Risk Management Survey is one of the most comprehensive barometers of corporate risk sentiment worldwide. Our most recent survey captured the perspectives of more than 2,800 risk decision-makers across over 60 countries and a broad range of industries.

The survey asks leaders to identify and rank their most critical current and emerging risks, as well as the preparedness levels and mitigation strategies they have in place. This gives us a data-driven view of how the global risk landscape is shifting – from supply chain disruption and geopolitical volatility to cyber risk and climate-related threats.

For clients, it becomes both a benchmarking tool and a practical roadmap, helping boards and senior executives prioritise where to invest time, capital and capabilities to build greater resilience and adapt in a new era of disruption.

What are the main forces pushing supply chains into Aon’s top 10 global risks?

In our view, supply chain risk is more significant for firms today than it has ever been. We are seeing several converging pressures driving this trend.

Firstly, supply chains are more complex – they are longer, more global, more interconnected and more technology dependent. They are also more fluid; firms are introducing nearshoring and reshoring measures, an example of which we’ve seen in the technology and semiconductor industries, which have started to move away from a concentration of production in East Asia to investments in the US and other regions.

Secondly, the risk profile of supply chains has become truly enterprise in nature. A decade ago, all the supply chain risk would have been viewed through the lens of protecting manufacturing plants, key distribution sites, or warehouses of suppliers. Attention would also have been paid to monitoring how a product, component, or ingredient is transported across the world. While these risks remain prevalent, we are now also seeing supply chains disrupted or impacted because of cyber events, insolvencies or geopolitical events - including tariffs.

Finally, supply chain risk is challenging to manage and we often see multiple stakeholder functions playing different roles. These can range from procurement, to finance, operations and risk.

What key differences did you see in supply chain risk across regions or industries?

Supply Chain or Distribution Failure was the seventh highest rated risk across our overall survey sample, so it is important globally. However, it is an even greater priority in certain segments.

Multinational firms with more than US$5bn in revenue rated the risk as number four. Leaders of North American and European multinationals, whose economies have come to depend on international supply chains, prioritised supply chain risk, as did leaders in Asia Pacific – a region that might typically be viewed as being more at the supplier end of the value chain, but with open economies such as Hong Kong and Singapore driving import to GDP ratios of over 150%.

From an industry perspective, leaders in Life Sciences rated the risk as number one, reflecting the long product lead times, limited alternative options and high consequences of supply chain failure, including patient safety and regulatory penalties.

Retail and Consumer Brands leaders rated the risk as number 2, reflecting the volatile nature of demand in the industry, combined with high competition and low operating margins.

Both Industrials / Manufacturing and the Food and Beverages sectors rated supply chain risk as their third highest priority, given the just-in-time lead times seen in many interconnected manufacturing processes and the perishable, highly regulated nature of many products in the food value chain. Of note in both manufacturing and food was the additional prominent positioning of commodity price and availability risk, which is inextricably linked to supply chain and has been evidenced more recently through the global tariffs.

How is AI reshaping supply chain risk management for senior leaders today?

AI is already proving itself to be both a help and a hindrance to supply chain risk management for senior leaders.

Today, we find ourselves with a wealth of unmatched risk-based data and analytics available to corporates, able to create visibility of their supply chains, monitor the performance of key suppliers and model assumption-based scenarios that help to forecast demand and risk. All this increased insight helps to drive certainty around decision-making on risk.

However, the rapid evolution of AI as an embedded component of supply chain management is also shifting the risk profile of supply chains. More automated decision-making can create blind spots, which can cause errors to scale quickly.

The cybersecurity risk profile of the supply chain also increases as the attack surface grows. The interconnected nature of systems powered by AI creates greater contagion risk, where failure in one node can quickly create a ripple effect throughout multiple companies. As an example, in 2025 there were several notable cloud outages attributed to AI tooling errors. Reported downtime was several hours, which impacted logistics platforms, inventory visibility and order processing across multiple industries.

What are the first practical steps organisations should take to build more resilient supply chains?

You need to start by understanding the primary drivers of value in your organisation. This can often be linked to earnings performance of key products or services, or the strategic importance of markets. This will give you some immediate focus from a supply chain perspective. There is no value in attempting to map your entire supply chain; this is costly, difficult and by the time you have an inventory of hundreds of thousands of suppliers, challenging to leverage.

When you understand your critical value chains, you can start to interrogate where the risk sits. A procurement leader will tend to gravitate around suppliers with the greatest spend, but much smaller, single source suppliers often present a more significant exposure.

When you understand who your critical suppliers are, you can start to analyse the risk presented by these suppliers, modelling the financial and operational impacts of disruption to that supplier and considering a range of scenarios. This will give you “one version of the truth”, which multiple stakeholders across the organisation can rally around and which can drive objective and consistent decision-making around key questions pertaining to supply chain design, risk management and redundancy, and balance sheet protection through risk capital solutions.