Advancing resilience at BCAW+R day two: AI-driven training and exercise innovation
At BCAW+R's second day, attention turned to AI's growing impact on resilience training, enabling more immersive exercises and stronger organizational performance.
Throughout the day, eight insightful webinars delved into the theory, ethics, and practical applications of AI in resilience. Each session offered actionable takeaways for practitioners to enhance engagement and challenge participants within their own organizations. Covering everything from preparedness and scenario design to post-exercise data analysis, the well-attended sessions provided plenty of food for thought.
Session highlights
The day’s opening session examined the BCI Horizon Scan Report 2024 and explored how modern AI and scenario modelling capabilities enhance the realism of exercises, supporting better decision-making to address modern threats. Throughout the morning, webinars engaged participants in AI crisis communications, from preparedness initiatives to full-scale exercises, featuring practical examples and hands-on activities practitioners could immediately implement. These sessions also explored the use of AI in generating exercise data and assessing performance to prove measurable outcomes.
The afternoon sessions included a popular step-by-step scenario build that showed exactly how practitioners can use free AI tools to quickly design tabletop exercises, and a discussion on how AI can streamline exercise design by leveraging AI-driven data analysis to create exercises tailored to specific risks, industry challenges, and historical incidents. Further sessions focused on opportunities for business continuity professionals to augment, accelerate, and automate their practices, such as using AI to analyse supplier dependencies, while also addressing important concerns around AI ethics, privacy, and security, including avoiding bias.
The day concluded with a session focused on "glowing up" tabletop exercises, with insights on successes and lessons learned from industry. This included exploring the auto-generation of exercises tailored to specific risk profiles, industries, and roles, and turning AI into the adversary in a "choose-your-own-chaos" format.
The day's insightful webinars and valuable participant interactions made it clear that practitioners are enthusiastic about using AI in training and exercising, and that many have already taken positive steps toward this new future, accelerating what has traditionally been a resource-intensive manual process into a faster, more engaging experience that improves outcomes.
Don't miss the rest of BCAW+R, where upcoming sessions will explore how AI is driving innovation in supply chain resilience, strengthening organizational resilience, and
delivering real-world impact across industries. With resource-rich webinars and inspiring success stories still to come, it's the perfect opportunity to deepen your understanding of AI's role in building more agile, prepared, and future-ready organizations at every step of the resilience process.
