The Resilience Profession Just Told Us What It Actually Wants. It Isn't Another Tool.

London, 16 September 2026 The BCI's Continuity and Resilience Report 2026 has just been published, and it is one of the more revealing editions in the series. Beneath the usual survey statistics sits a fairly blunt message from practitioners across the world, and it is worth sitting with before the next budget cycle or board paper gets written. The single strongest finding in the entire dataset is this.

More than nine in ten respondents, 92.2 percent, expect senior management attention to business continuity and resilience to increase over the next five years. Not one percent expect it to decline. The report's authors describe this as the strongest consensus recorded in any edition of the survey to date, up from 83.2 percent only a year ago. Board level support follows closely at 85 percent, and 84.4 percent expect cross team collaboration to matter more.

Put simply, practitioners are not asking for a new framework, a new certification or a new piece of software. They are asking for sustained, visible commitment from the people who set strategy and hold budget.That distinction matters, because so much of the resilience conversation over the past decade has been about tools and standards.

This year's data suggests the profession has largely moved past that stage and landed on a harder problem, which is organisational attention and coordination.

A Profession finding its Own Shape.

One of the report's underlying themes is that business continuity and resilience are increasingly being treated as separate disciplines, each with its own expectations and governance requirements. That separation is presented as a sign of maturity, and in many respects it is. But the qualitative interviews woven through the report tell a more complicated story underneath the headline figures.

One business continuity director describes resilience as an umbrella meant to cover business continuity, disaster recovery, third party risk management and crisis management, while conceding that the edges of that umbrella are still being defined because the underlying functions sit in different departments, on different systems, reporting through different lines.

Another respondent, an assistant director of business resilience, describes two teams with practically identical terms of reference running two parallel sets of training and documentation for the same purpose, and asks the obvious question. Why not simply merge it into one process.

A third interviewee, an operational resilience manager in the utilities sector, puts the coordination problem in sharper terms still, noting that cyber teams talk about cyber resilience, data protection teams talk about data resilience, and business continuity teams talk about their own version, with no senior level coordination to bring it together as a single discipline rather than a set of siloed approaches. These are not isolated comments. They are consistent with the technology adoption figures elsewhere in the report, which show a genuinely fragmented landscape.

Emergency notification software leads adoption at 48.8 percent, business continuity planning software delivered as a cloud based service sits at 39 percent, risk assessment software at just over 30 percent, and a striking 26 percent of organisations are still running in house developed solutions rather than a purpose built platform.

Very few organisations appear to be managing business continuity, resilience, third party risk and crisis management from a single, coherent system. Most are managing it from several.

The AI question, and the Caveat that matters.

The report's most eye catching trend is the growth of artificial intelligence tools in resilience planning, which have nearly tripled in adoption over two years, from 7.2 percent of organisations in 2024 to 24.4 percent in 2026. That is a genuine shift, and the report treats it as evidence that AI is moving from the periphery of the profession into a meaningful, working part of how organisations approach planning and scenario analysis. The caveat is worth reading carefully, because it will matter enormously to anyone considering AI enabled resilience tools over the next few years. The academic research cited in the report found that AI enabled continuity systems can meaningfully outperform traditional approaches on detection of disruption, recovery speed and compliance, but only where they sit on a foundation of strong data integrity, robust cybersecurity and genuine, well governed collaboration between human judgement and the AI system.

Adopting AI tools without that underlying data governance in place risks limited returns at best, and new vulnerabilities at worst.

That is an important message for any organisation currently weighing up AI enabled resilience capability.

The Value is not in the AI layer itself

It is in the quality and coherence of the data that layer sits on top of. An AI tool bolted onto five disconnected systems and a shared drive full of spreadsheets is unlikely to deliver what the research promises. An AI capability built on top of a single, well structured resilience platform is a different proposition entirely.

Moving beyond the Tick Box

There is one more figure in the report worth highlighting, because it captures where the profession's collective instinct is heading. Nearly two thirds of respondents, 61.8 percent, expect the idea of business continuity as a tick box exercise to become less important over the next five years, the strongest decline signal recorded anywhere in the survey. Practitioners are telling the BCI, in fairly unambiguous terms, that they want to move away from compliance driven paperwork and towards resilience capability that is genuinely operational, genuinely integrated and genuinely useful when something goes wrong.Taken together, the picture painted by the 2026 report is coherent, even if the individual findings arrived from very different parts of the survey. Senior leaders are paying more attention. Boards are getting more involved. Teams are being asked to collaborate more closely across functions that have historically operated in isolation.

Technology adoption is accelerating, particularly around AI, but its value depends entirely on the quality of the data and governance underneath it. And practitioners themselves are pushing to leave compliance box ticking behind in favour of something that actually works under pressure.What this means in practice

For organisations in the Channel Islands and beyond, the practical implication is straightforward, even if it is not easy to act on. Resilience maturity in 2026 is less about acquiring another point solution and more about achieving genuine alignment, across governance, across data, and across the functions that the BCI's respondents keep describing as siloed.

The organisations that make real progress over the next five years will very likely be the ones that treat business continuity, operational resilience, cyber, third party risk and crisis management as one coordinated discipline with one sh

ared, trustworthy source of information, rather than as several parallel programmes that happen to report into the same director. That is a demanding standard, and it will not be met by good intentions alone.

It will be met by organisations that are honest about where their current arrangements are fragmented, and deliberate about closing that gap before the next disruption tests it for them.

Chris Oliver FBCI Principal Director armstrong-resilience.com and armus2.com Vice Chair of Professional Standards, The Business Continuity Institute Source: BCI Continuity and Resilience Report 2026