Aon’s Resilience Quotient: Navigating From Risk to Resilience and Growth

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Aon's Resilience Quotient

Aon’s Resilience Quotient

Navigating from Risk to Resilience and Growth

Aon’s Resilience Quotient

Many of today’s most consequential business decisions are being made in environments where risk, opportunity and uncertainty are deeply interconnected and where the path to sustainable growth is less linear, more volatile and increasingly shaped by external forces. Leaders are allocating capital, making investment commitments and shaping workforce strategies in the context of economic, geopolitical and operational volatilities that interact and compound over time. The combined influence of four key megatrends — trade, technology, weather and workforce — is reshaping how organizations assess risk, plan for the future and position themselves for growth. In this environment, resilience has shifted from a defensive capability to a core business consideration, informing decision quality, adaptability and long-term performance.

Rather than asking only where risk is lowest, leaders are increasingly asking where risk can be absorbed, adapted to and converted into an advantage.

From Fragmented Signals to Integrated Insight

Navigating this complexity requires a holistic, integrated view of risk and resilience that draws on a broad range of enterprise and external data, spanning economic, geopolitical, workforce and environmental signals. Viewed in isolation, these signals can obscure where risk is truly accumulating or where resilience can be strengthened more effectively.

By integrating these perspectives, leaders are better equipped to:

  • Allocate capital with discipline.
  • Prioritize resources with intent.
  • Make trade-offs explicit rather than implicit.
  • Pursue sustainable growth with greater confidence.
Jump to Section

  1. What is Aon’s Resilience Quotient?

  2. Applying Aon’s Resilience Quotient to Decision-Making

  3. Data Center Infrastructure: Powering the AI Economy

  4. A Workforce Empowered to Innovate and Thrive Through AI

  5. Enabling Resilient, Sustainable Migration

  6. Key Takeaways: Risk, Resilience and Better Decisions

What is Aon’s Resilience Quotient?

Aon’s Resilience Quotient is an analytical tool integrating proprietary Risk Capital and Human Capital data across the four megatrends, sentiment analysis and insights from leading analytics and advisory firm Gallup, and selected public data sets.

ARQ

Figure 1: Aon's Resilience Quotient

Aon’s Resilience Quotient complements traditional quantitative data and market activity with indicators of sentiment, demographic trends, and institutional confidence for a more holistic perspective or risk and resilience.


Aon’s Resilience Quotient score comprises:

  • The Risk Index, which reflects exposure to volatility, shocks and structural stressors across the four megatrends
  • The Resilience Index, which reflects institutional strength, workforce capacity, adaptability and recovery potential across the four megatrends
  • The Resilience/Risk Quotient, which shows how effectively resilience offsets risk, rather than ranking locations in absolute terms

The Quotient is calculated as the ratio of the Resilience Index to the Risk Index. A value of 1 indicates balance, values above 1 indicate that resilience outweighs risk and values below 1 indicate that risk outweighs resilience.

Importantly, similar scores can mask materially different resilience pathways. Countries, sectors and organizations can achieve comparable outcomes through distinct combinations of governance, workforce dynamics, technological maturity and environmental preparedness. Understanding these underlying drivers is critical to interpreting exposure to volatility and resilience across geographies and industries.

Rather than asking only where risk is lowest, leaders are increasingly asking where risk can be absorbed, adapted to and converted into an advantage.

Applying Aon’s Resilience Quotient to Decision-Making

Aon’s Resilience Quotient supports informed decision-making across a range of business contexts that reflect different risk profiles, priorities and constraints. It enables leaders to assess resilience across operations, sectors and geographies, and consider how actions and investments may shape outcomes over time.

Resilience and stability do not always move in parallel, and in higher-stakes decisions, resilience can be a source of long-term advantage rather than a defensive consideration. In choices that influence future competitiveness — such as those relating to data center infrastructure, the adoption of AI in the workforce or the effects of forced migration — Aon’s Resilience Quotient provides a disciplined way to apply judgment and understand how resilience and growth can be advanced together.

Aon’s Resilience Quotient is not a static measure, prescriptive ranking or risk scorecard. Instead, it is designed to:

  • Surface trade-offs that are often hidden in one-dimensional risk assessments.
  • Identify where targeted investments can most effectively strengthen resilience.
  • Support judgment is high-stakes, long-horizon decisions.

Differences in scores should be interpreted directionally, alongside an understanding of the underlying drivers, time horizons and organizational capacity to influence outcomes.

The following case studies illustrate how Aon’s Resilience Quotient help inform strategic judgment across different decision contexts.

Data Center Infrastructure: Powering the AI Economy

In the race for AI dominance, today’s data centers have evolved into critical infrastructure underpinning the digital economy. By the end of 2024, more than 11,800 facilities were in operation globally, with over $1.3 trillion in projected investment over the next five years.1 This growth opportunity is intensifying exposure to a range of complex risks, including constraints on power availability and grid stability, extreme climate activity and unprecedented heat, energy volatility and escalating cyber threats.

As a result, organizations must apply strategic judgment when determining where and how to invest, informed by both risk exposure and resilience capacity.

Comparative Insight: U.S. and Germany

Aon’s Resilience Quotient measures the risk and resilience related to building and scaling infrastructure across countries. In this scenario, a CEO is evaluating whether to locate a new data center in the U.S. or Germany. The analysis shows that while the two countries have broadly comparable resilience quotients (the U.S. with 1.21 and Germany with 1.32), the sources of resilience differ materially.

  • The U.S. exhibits higher overall risk, driven primarily by weather-related conditions; however, these threats are offset through stronger technology and workforce resilience.
  • Germany, by contrast, relies more heavily on institutional resilience, with risk exposure concentrated in workforce bottlenecks rather than climate volatility.
Megatrend USA Germany
Risk Index 41 38
Resilience Index 50.4 49.8
Resilience/Risk Quotient 1.21 1.32

Figure 2: Aon’s Resilience Quotient Scores for U.S. vs. Germany re: Infrastructure and Data Centers

Using insights from Aon’s Resilience Quotient, the CEO can take a holistic approach to decision-making, allowing them to move beyond one-dimensional assessments of the investment decision and develop a more balanced, informed view of where targeted action can unlock opportunity. The race to power the AI economy is on, and where a company decides to invest, operate and grow can provide a competitive advantage.

A Workforce Empowered to Innovate and Thrive Through AI

The potential impact of AI on the workforce, from role displacement to accelerated upskilling, remains a central concern. Aon’s latest research2 confirms AI will be transformative; leaders who understand the risks and invest in building resilient workforces are better positioned to support effective AI deployment and long-term growth. Globally, just 21 percent of employees are fully engaged with their jobs 3, signaling constrained organizational capacity to absorb change, mobilize talent and sustain productivity through disruption. Importantly, this engagement measure reflects overall work involvement and commitment rather than technical proficiency or AI readiness. However, low engagement consistently correlates with reduced adaptability.

Comparative Insight: U.S., Germany, India, Brazil and Mexico

Our integrated analysis shows the interaction among workplace sentiment, institutional confidence and an organization’s capacity to adapt. Higher workplace engagement is associated with more supportive, high-trust cultures that adopt new technologies faster,4 but a structural talent deficit magnifies exposure to automation and digital transformation.5 Fostering trust and confidence can reduce resistance to new tools and facilitate adoption – and ensuring a robust talent pipeline, including outsourcing and succession planning, can help reduce volatility.

In this example, a chief human resources officer and chief technology officer of a multinational manufacturer are deciding where to deploy AI as part of a rapid rollout across customer service, procurement and maintenance functions. While Aon’s Resilience Quotient scores across the U.S., Germany, India, Brazil and Mexico are relatively clustered (with scores of 1.44 to 2.24), the underlying drivers vary significantly due to differences in workforce engagement, governance maturity, institutional capacity and maturity, economic stability and workforce resilience.

Aon's Resilience Quotient also highlights where sentiment aligns or diverges from structural readiness.

Megatrend US Germany India Brazil Mexico
Risk Index 27 31 32 28 28
Resilience Index 58 68 50 41 44
Resilience/Risk Quotient 2.14 2.24 1.56 1.44 1.58

Figure 3. Aon’s Resilience Quotient Scores for U.S., Germany, India, Brazil and Mexico re: AI/Workforce 6


These differences demonstrate that countries can achieve resilience through different approaches, with some anchored in governance and innovation and others in workplace adaptability and dynamism. Ultimately, resilience to AI disruption is shaped not only by country-level conditions but also by how effectively organizations bolster their own capacities to mitigate disruption, adapt to AI and transform its operations.

Aon’s Resilience Quotient offers a structured way to identify where investments in capacity could yield the greatest return, guiding leaders toward strategies that convert AI-related volatility into sustained productivity gains, rather than leaders viewing resilience rankings as prescriptive location advice.

AI will be transformative for the workforce. Leaders who understand the risks and invest in building resilient workforces are better positioned to support effective AI deployment and long-term growth.

AI will be transformative; leaders who understand the risks and invest in building resilient workforces are better positioned to support effective AI deployment and long-term growth.

Enabling Resilient, Sustainable Migration

Forced migration — the involuntary movement of people driven by conflict, persecution, disaster or other life-threatening disruptions — has surged to an all-time high, with more than 120 million people in the world currently displaced.7 Climate change is amplifying extreme weather events that now uproot tens of millions each year,8 protracted conflicts and generalized violence have created record refugee flows, and economic collapse and governance failures in fragile states are sparking mass exoduses. Business leaders, governments and humanitarian organizations face an imperative to address forced migration while laying the foundation for more-resilient societies and economies across the globe.

Aon’s Resilience Quotient highlights the factors that contribute to stability and helps illuminate where risk is likely to generate displacement and, separately, where resilience exists to absorb shocks without cascading into secondary crises such as service collapse, social unrest or destabilization in host communities.

Comparative Insight: Kenya, South Sudan, Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador

In this example, we consider a regional director of a global humanitarian organization who is tasked with allocating response teams and standby financing across East Africa and Latin America. The central challenge is not simply predicting where displacement will originate but preventing predictable overload in host countries.

120M

Forced migration has surged to an all-time high, with over 120 million people currently displaced globally as multiple crises converge.

Megatrend Kenya South Sudan Colombia Venezuela Ecuador
Risk Index 70 81 57 58 59
Resilience Index 54 36 52 41 48
Resilience/Risk Quotient 0.78 0.44 0.91 0.70 0.70

Figure 4. Aon’s Resilience Quotient Scores for Kenya - Sudan, and for Colombia - Venezuela - Ecuador on Forced Migration

 

The analysis suggests a two-portfolio strategy: The first is origin response, focused on acute life-saving interventions in extreme-risk settings where displacement is persistent and unavoidable in the near term, and the second is absorption protection, aimed at preserving functions of the host system in comparatively resilient countries that will predictably receive inflows. The data makes clear that resilience to forced migration is not predetermined by geography or conflict exposure.

Strengthening social-support networks, improving civic participation, enhancing crisis management capacity and advancing climate adaptation planning can materially alter a country’s displacement trajectory. By identifying which resilience levers carry the highest marginal return in each context, Aon’s Resilience Quotient helps stakeholders prioritize investments and anticipatory actions that prevent volatility from cascading into large-scale humanitarian crises.

Key Takeaways: Risk, Resilience and Better Decisions

Volatility is a persistent feature of the global operating environment. What differentiates outcomes is not simply the level of risk organizations face but how that risk is understood, interpreted and reflected in decision-making over time.

Aon’s Resilience Quotient is designed to evolve as new data emerges, lived experiences shift and external forces shape the risk landscape. It provides a structured way to explore the potential implications of decisions and to bring greater clarity to moments of uncertainty.

The full report complements traditional lagging indicators of quantitative data and market activity with leading indicators of sentiment, demographic trends and institutional confidence. Together, these inputs create a more rounded view of risk. By integrating previously disparate data, Aon’s Resilience Quotient offers clearer insight into how risk and resilience interact across operations, sectors and geographies, helping leaders better understand where targeted actions may support resilience and long-term growth.

Aon’s Perspective

Aon brings together Risk Capital and Human Capital insights, proprietary data, analytics and deep sector expertise to help clients better understand the forces shaping risk, resilience and growth. This integrated perspective reflects Aon’s focus on addressing the questions leaders are grappling with today, where risk is emerging, how resilience can be strengthened and how today’s decisions may shape outcomes in the long term.

 

1 Aon, “Cyber Risk is the Weak Link in Data Center Construction,” November 5, 2025, https://www.aon.com/en/insights/articles/cyber-risk-is-the-weak-link-in-data-center-construction.

2 AI and Workforce Skills: Who Should Act and Why Now?,” Aon, July 30, 2025, www.aon.com/en/insights/articles/ai-and-workforce-skills-who-should-act-and-why-now.

3 Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2025, 2025, https://www.gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-workplace.aspx.

4 Gallup, Gallup Q12 Meta-Analysis, 2024, https://www.gallup.com/workplace/321725/gallup-q12-meta-analysis-report.aspx.

5 Aon’s 2025 Global Risk Management Survey.

6 Quotient values are calculated using full-precision underlying index scores prior to rounding. Displayed component scores are rounded for readability, which may result in minor differences when ratios are recalculated from the rounded figures shown.

7 UNHCR, “How climate change impacts refugees and displaced communities,” November 12, 2024, https://www.unrefugees.org/news/how-climate-change-impacts-refugees-and-displaced-communities.

8 UNHCR, “How climate change impacts refugees.”

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Aon’s Resilience Quotient: Navigating From Risk to Resilience and Growth