From resilience to survivability: How AI forces a rethink of business continuity
Artificial intelligence is forcing companies to change almost every aspect of their business. From operations to hiring to sales and training, change is happening faster than ever. One aspect of this change that has flown under the radar is the need for companies to rethink their business continuity plans.
AI is pressuring enterprises to move beyond traditional ideas of resilience and toward architectures and operating models that assume continuous, systemic disruption — and can keep the business running anyway. For information technology leaders, that means business continuity shifts from a document-and-disaster recovery exercise to an operating discipline.
Equinix Inc.’s recent announcement, “Resilience Isn’t Enough: The New Rules of Business Continuity,” argues that redundancy and failover are no longer sufficient as disruptions become systemic. The company highlights research indicating that Global 2000 firms now incur roughly $400 billion in downtime annually, with an average cost of about $540,000 per hour, underscoring how business-wide the continuity problem has become. I expect that as AI becomes more embedded in organizations and productivity grows, the cost of downtime will also increase.
