On Aon Podcast: Resilience as a Growth Strategy: Inside Aon’s Resilience Quotient

Intro:
Hello and welcome to this, the first episode of On Aon for 2026. And it’s not just a new year – it’s a new format for On Aon. We’re increasing the frequency of episodes to once a week with each week dedicated to either a Risk Capital, Human Capital, Industry or Global topic.

• Our Global Insight episodes will discuss what’s happening in the world in geopolitics, economics and regulation and how they’re impacting businesses.
• Risk Capital Insight is a deep dive — not only into the main risks organizations are facing — but also how they’re responding.
• Human Capital Insight is all about the latest talent, health and wealth trends that are guiding workforce decisions around the world.
• And our Industry Insight will look at a different sector each episode and the risk and people issues they’re facing.

So let’s start our first episode. It’s a Global Insight and on it are: Bridget Gainer, Aon’s Chief Public Affairs Officer and Dan Foy, who’s US business leader for global research at Gallup.

Together, they cover a range of topics — from Aon’s participation at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the thinking behind our new benchmark, The Aon Resilience Quotient; and the importance of building a complete, quantitative and qualitative, view of risk and resilience.

Bridget Gainer:
Hello, welcome to the On Aon podcast and the first of our regular Global Insight episodes where we're going to dive into the issues that are impacting businesses around the world.

My name is Bridget Gainer and I'm the Chief Public Affairs Officer here at Aon. And this episode is being recorded just after Greg Case, our CEO, our Chief Administrative Officer, Lisa Stevens, and myself returned from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

So many of you obviously are familiar with what happens at Davos and throughout the week, we brought together leaders to explore resilience, leadership, and the forces influencing the global agenda.

One of the best reasons to go to Davos are twofold. One is for all the bilateral meetings that we can have with clients, many of whom are around the world.

In addition, we hosted sessions at the World Economic Forum where we brought together clients, policymakers, other people influential in issues to understand where the world was going, how do we move from risk to resilience from resilience to sustainable long-term growth.

So, Greg hosted a roundtable discussion in collaboration with the Financial Times to explore how resilience can become a platform for innovation, informed decision-making and growth. He was able to take this concept and apply it to something very strategic and tactical, which is the decision-making around choosing a location and investment for AI data centers, something that is a tremendous priority for many of our clients.

Lisa Stevens, our Chief Administrative Officer, along with Fortune Magazine, brought together CHROs, Chief People Officers, and Chief Impact Officers to explore how organizations can protect and develop early career talent in the AI-driven economy.

Anyone who has a current college student or recent college graduate in their life knows that this topic is a tremendous driver of concern. How are we going to make the workplace of AI amenable to young people?

And lastly, I hosted a discussion among senior leaders from financial services, humanitarian organizations, some of the multilateral banks and government about how we can take the humanitarian finance crisis — because they have received notification that they're going to be receiving a lot fewer donations from member governments. They're in a resource crisis. How do we bring the tools of our industry, our ability to anticipate to forecast risk and to bring private capital to bear? How do we employ that in some of the most important and vulnerable communities in our world?

You know, when you look at today's business landscape, one thing is clear. Complexity and volatility are not temporary conditions and we can't just wait them out. It's the new normal. Economic cycles are shorter, geopolitical shocks travel faster, technology is more disruptive, weather events are more extreme and workforce dynamics are fundamentally shifting.

The debate has shifted from “could this happen?” sometime in the future to “what is the best strategy when this does happen in my future?”

Today, resilience can't just be defensive. It has to be thought of as enhancing our decision quality, enhancing our adaptability, and ultimately building our long-term performance.

So to help our clients, Aon has built analyzers, diagnostics, benchmarks that place risk, capital and talent decisions in context of these larger world issues. Our tech-driven solutions enable organizations to compare exposures against their peers, to test scenarios, and to understand how different strategic choices influence resilience over time.

And that is also our motivation behind the new Aon Resilience Quotient.

Aon's Resilience Quotient score is made up of three inputs. The first is the risk index. What is our exposure to volatility? What about shocks, structural stressors in the four megatrends?

The next is the resilient factors. These reflect institutional strength, workforce capacity, adaptability, and recovery potential across the megatrends.

When you bring them together, they create the resilience and risk quotient. This shows how effectively resilience offsets some of the risk rather than just ranking locations on absolute terms.

And in general, we are very used to looking at risk factors. We're used to looking at ranking them, quantifying them, assigning a numerical value to them. But we also often underestimate the resilience factors. The fact that we can bring these together allows us to focus on the risk factors that cannot be offset and then to focus on growth.

So I'm joined today by Dan Foy from Gallup. And Gallup was our partner in this effort because in order to come up with a truly robust set of resilience and risk factors, you can't just look at the hard data.

You need to create an opportunity for sentiment, for qualitative analysis to come together to really lead us to better decisions.

So, Dan, I'd like you — if you could perhaps talk a little bit about how Gallup's insight brought new ideas to bear, how risk is experienced around the world, and how does that feed into what we're building here.

So welcome, first of all, to the On Aon Podcast, and we're happy to have you.

Dan Foy:
Yeah, it's so great to be here, Bridget. Thank you for creating the space for this conversation and for all of the great partnership that Aon and your team has brought to bear in the development of this Quotient.

So, I really love this project for a couple of reasons. One of those is because over the course of my career, I've had the privilege to be involved in many analytic projects at Gallup. We sit on a mountain of data here. We collect data all over the world, all the time. That's what we do.

But what we often miss is the opportunity to really try and take that data to the next level. And I see that happening here in what we've been able to do with the Resilience Quotient. And a big part of that is the focus required to really think critically about the challenges that data can shed insight on.

So, for instance, you mentioned the example of these case studies. Take the example of AI in the workforce. It's in the headlines all the time. People are talking about this issue. People are aware that there's a potential for pretty significant disruption out there.

At the same time, we see these really catastrophically risk scenarios, catastrophic risk scenarios out there suggesting that is AI going to eat all of the jobs over the course of the coming generation? But then we also see these companies and their valuations are just skyrocketing. So, there's a lot of optimism. There's a lot of fear. And how do you make sense of all of that noise?

What we've done with the ARQ is one attempt to really try and bring that data together in a way that helps decision makers evaluate what are the true underlying factors? How do you get past the headlines? How do you really try and understand the relationship between the workforce you have today, the workforce you need in the future, the workforce that's coming into the market? You mentioned those college graduates and college applicants, those who just coming into their careers. What does that look like?

And then trying to understand how are those changes likely to impact what goes on inside of businesses? And really critically with the index is also trying to understand how that variation looks different across different settings.

So different companies, different industries, different locations around the world. So just bringing all that information together like this, it's something that is really unique, something that we haven't really seen happen in many settings before.

The other thing that I think is really excellent here is the way that we've been able to bring together a diverse set of data sources. Again, you mentioned the examples of some of the great data that Aon collects that Aon knows about your partners and your customers or knows about the world if we're about satellite data. There's also macroeconomic data out there, so everybody's familiar with the World Bank, with Federal Reserve, with the kind of information that gets put out by official statistics agencies.

The unique piece that I think in this setting is also bringing in lot of the maybe nontraditional indicators, and that's where Gallup comes in, where some of the data from sources like the Gallup World Poll which is infrastructure that we've developed over the course of two decades now to collect opinions from 98% of the world's population. We're in over 140 countries every single year asking questions about a whole range of attributes that are really critical to people's lives.

And then taking that data, weaving it together in a way that really tries to tell a story around specific issues that leaders care about. So that's what's brought us to where we are today and where I think there's so much potential for where the ARQ can go next.

Bridget Gainer:
That's great. And for us, the ARQ was truly a big idea. It was a net new idea. It's something that even across our industry where data has become a focus over the last 10 years, even more so than it always has been, bringing together quantitative data was something that really was never considered.

But if you look at the history of this industry, it was very relationship-based. It was very transactional-based. And it started to evolve to elevate the importance of data 15, 20 years ago.

And now that has become the tip of the spear for how people make decisions. But in the moment that we're in rising populism, we can just talk about the political bifurcation, you know, variety, people get their news from many different sources.

Coming up with multiple inputs into how business leaders make decisions can only make those decisions better. And so at Aon, we were really excited to take our deep expertise — whether it's weather data, political risk data, economic analysis, even the new, the tools that we've developed that are able to scrape a hundred thousand different data sources out in the media, the Aon Risk Indicator it’s called, to give a sense of how our opinions and facts appearing out in the world.

Blending all that together with quantitative data has to us been a game changer. So we're thrilled to partner with Gallup. You're clearly the leader in that part of the industry. And our hope now is, that this combined decision-making matrix that we've created together will only help to reduce the volatility for our clients across the economy. So excited.

So, Dan, one of the most important things that I found working on the Aon Risk Quotient was that in an increasingly complex and volatile environment, a broader approach to resilience is so important.

We've used the Gallup data here to measure population and workforce sentiment in areas such as engagement, confidence, trust, Has Gallup identified any big swings in those areas that have a particular bearing on what we're highlighting through the Aon Resilience Quotient?

Dan Foy:
Yeah, absolutely. Those are such great examples to point to of all of the indicators that go into the Quotient. Really, really distinct opportunities emerge when you look at these sets of data.

Maybe I'll take the first one. You mentioned employee engagement. So you think about we often, again, lots of times investors or leaders will be looking at just macro economic data or business level data. We can count sales, we can count revenue, we can look at how GDP is doing, we can look at employment rate.

But what you miss in all of those indicators is what's going on in the hearts and minds of the people who are actually bringing these organizations to life. We forget sometimes companies are not just the name on their stock ticker, they're actually the people inside of those organizations.

And one of the things that Gallup has learned over time and a lot of our work that we do with organizations all over the world is that really, one, you can measure this, you can measure what an organization with really high engagement looks like and understand how those organizations are different from organizations that have lower engagement.

So Gallup's really spent a lot of time trying to understand the science of how do we measure this? What are the key indicators that go into making up an engaged workforce?

The other key insight is that you can move this number. And so that's just this really big insight for organizations. And we don't need to get into all of the HR details and management and what it takes to succeed in that today. But I think the big takeaway when you think about engagement is recognizing that different organizations, different societies, different populations, they're approaching their work in different ways.

And being able to understand and bring the variables that help you measure that into the equation is really unique compared to what a lot of prior attempts at doing this kind of work may have looked at.

So, recognizing that some societies have higher rates of engagement, some organizations within those societies are really have very strong engagement.

And their performance, their resilience, their ability to adapt and integrate new technologies to deal with the kinds of unknown challenges that are on the horizon is going to look fundamentally different than organizations that really struggle with engagement because they just are, they're more brittle. They're less likely to be accepting of change. They're less likely to buy into the organizational leadership.

So taking that data, putting it on the board, as it were, in the ARQ, that's one key aspect.

Another one, so if we zoom out from organizational level and think about societies here, you mentioned institutional confidence is another great example. this is something, again, Gallup has been tracking data on confidence in institutions, globally for going on 20 years now. In the US, we've gone back even further. These were questions that George Gallup was asking in the 1930s and 1940s when we first started conducting surveys in a really scientific way.

And one of the really distressing trends that we've seen is this erosion in confidence in institutions over time. And this is something we see in the headlines in the US certainly, but it's not just a US story. We see this in Europe. We see this across the board in a lot of societies where people are becoming more and more skeptical of the old institutions that were seen as the many cases, the bulwark against risk, that resilience came through the institutions that societies had built. It came from governments, it came from the courts, it came from businesses.

If confidence in those institutions is really starting to slip, that's a warning sign for societies and understanding how that confidence is moving over time at a societal level. Also understanding underneath that, trying to understand differences among different segments of populations within those societies. That's a really key piece of it as well.

Bridget Gainer:
You touched on two things that are in many ways ephemeral, but massively connected to a firm's ability to grow and succeed. This idea of employee engagement in relation to adaptability.

I really want to put a finer point on it because it was something that we found incredibly interesting when we were looking at AI adoption. If AI is coming, it has a huge opportunity to bring productivity. So if you look at, Bloomberg reported just today that the US is seeing about a 10% increase in productivity in firms that adopt AI.

But if your workforce doesn't trust that the AI is going to be beneficial to their future, they think maybe all of those benefits will be upstreamed to just whether it's the stock price or the leadership, they're not going to adapt to it in the same way. They're not going to lean into new ways that they could do it. You're not going to be able to tap into the interest, intelligence, innovation capabilities of your employees to really drive that productivity gains.

Similarly so on the institution piece — a lack of trust in institutions is really a hard thing to nail down. When you're looking at it, this was an opportunity when we talked about the AI data centers. If people don't have faith in say their local governments or some of the regulatory bodies, they may result in a protest or trying to stop someone from getting a permit because they don't actually believe that the entity that should be looking over their access to electricity or looking over the safety of their water supply is going to do that in the way that they have confidence in.

And so it means that organizations that are looking to invest in a certain jurisdiction can't rely on maybe agreements that they've made with the government, assessments of the local economy, they have to factor in these other drivers of decisions. And I think that institutional strength and employee adaptability both have it as an underlying foundation trust.

But the fact that you've turned trust either the ability to have trust, the lack of trust, you've turned it into a factor that can be quantified into a discussion, whether that's with your board, whether that's with your bank, whether that's with an analyst or a rating agency, to put some quantitative wrap onto something that may have a real, it may have a real import in your ability to execute a really important operational decision.

So I think that those two things take something that we know is important, like trust, but they turn it into something we can talk about quantitatively with all of our stakeholders.

So last question. And Dan, so given everything that we've discussed from global volatility to the evolving relationship between risk and resilience, what's the one insight or action that leaders should take away as they think about building a more resilient organization in the year ahead?

Dan Foy:
Yeah, that's a great question. I would really encourage leaders to step back and evaluate their assumptions. I think that trying to get past the headlines, as we talked about earlier, trying to look for unique sources of data, which the ARQ is absolutely an example of one of those unique sources of data, and really trying to systematically question a lot of the assumptions that are going into the decisions that they're making and trying to understand at a nuanced level, not just at a broad brush level, do we say that this country or this country is a safer investment?

What does that mean? We have to get underneath the hood of that kind of a question and understand the different domains, the different factors, and then importantly understand how those are changing over time.

We've got this really fascinating example unfolding right in front of us with Venezuela right now. You've got a country that all of a sudden the conditions on the ground have changed pretty significantly just over the last month.

People thought they knew something about this country, all of a sudden a lot of those assumptions are called into question. So you can either sit with uncertainty or you can step back and say, okay, what do we know? What is consistent over time? What are the factors that aren't changing here? What are the factors where maybe I have a question mark next to them now and I need to spend more attention trying to understand what's going on there? And then what are you going to be the key indicators that I'm watching going forward to know if the kinds of decisions that I'm making are the right decisions?

And Venezuela is this one example, but we see this all over the world in many circumstances where you have outcomes of an election that all of a sudden cast policy making into doubt. You've got a natural disaster that all of a sudden changes the conditions for large swaths of the population. We've got all of these changes that are happening on an ongoing basis. And the ARQ is really this opportunity to have a dashboard that gives you the kinds of signals you need in order to be making more intentional decisions on an ongoing basis.

Bridget Gainer:
I think that's great. Two of the really interesting insights that came out of the World poll for me was if you're looking at where to locate a data center, for example.

When we looked at Mexico, Mexico has an increasing trust in institutions, higher than the US, higher than some of the surrounding countries. How do I factor that into my decision making? Then you look at a country like Germany, massive pipeline of STEM talent but also a high trust in the employers. So you're seeing not just the skill set, but the adaptability.

So that's where you got a combination, I think, of quantitative and qualitative that ended up being really interesting.

That is our show for today. Thank you all for listening. And thank you, Dan, for joining us and for the partnership with AI going forward.

In the next month, we're going to have regular Global Insights episodes that highlight and explore the big political, economic, and regulatory news that matters to businesses around the world.

And you can find out more about the Aon Resilience quotient at Aon.com. And until next time, thanks very much for joining.

Outro:
Thanks for tuning into the latest episode of On Aon. If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and be sure to visit Aon.com to learn more about Aon.

We’ll be back next week with another episode — our Risk Capital Insight — where we’ll be discussing the latest Aon Climate and Catastrophe Insight report.