Good morning. Ask Edmund Reese, CFO of the $75 billion professional services and risk management firm Aon, what’s keeping CEOs and finance chiefs up at night. His answer begins with a list, not a single risk.
“There’s a lot happening right now at once,” he told me. Geopolitical flare-ups in the Middle East are disrupting supply chains. The AI infrastructure boom is driving unprecedented spending on data centers. Cyber threats have climbed to the top of the corporate agenda. For today’s executives, the challenge isn’t any one risk—it’s how quickly they intersect and compound.
“We do a survey each year where we poll the top CEOs, and it’s been oscillating between geopolitical risk being the number one,” Reese said. But cyber overtook it this past year, becoming the top risk on CEOs’ minds in Aon’s latest polling, he said.
Another major concern is how AI is reshaping talent needs. “Talent is always at the top of the list for me,” Reese said. In an industry where competitors aggressively court top performers, Aon is betting that investing in employees—and equipping them with AI-powered tools—will be a competitive advantage.
“We have been on our front foot,” Reese said. AI-driven automation of invoicing, claims, and policy management contributed to the 70 basis points of margin improvement last quarter, he said. AI-enabled “risk analyzers” used during client pitches have also lifted RFP win rates by 40%, helping drive the 10 percentage points of Q2 growth that came from new clients and expanded wallet share.
