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To hear some people talk, the new AI tools can conduct your BIA interviews, write your recovery plans, and then do the dishes and make your bed. In fact, while AI has the potential to help with some of the routine aspects of business continuity, making an organization resilient still requires a large infusion of human talent.
Related on MHA Consulting: A BC Consultant’s View of the Risks of Generative AI
Bullish on AI
Recently, I’ve had conversations with corporate managers and people in the BC community who are extremely bullish on the potential of AI to remake BC. They think AI will make human expertise in BC unnecessary, quickly and cheaply cranking out BIAs, writing recovery plans, and conducting mock disaster exercises.
The people that hold this view misunderstand either AI or BC or both.
Grunt Work vs. High-Level Tasks
Of the six activities that go into creating a BC program, AI is adept at three of them. It’s good at working with publicly available information (such as the leading free BC standards), creating templates, and crunching data. However, AI has either limited or no ability at doing these other three BC tasks: obtaining information that exists only in people’s heads, making judgments about an organization’s values and priorities, and engaging collaboratively with human beings in the real world.
Well, guess what. The first three items constitute the grunt work of business continuity. The second three are the heart and soul of a sound, custom-tailored, functional BC program.
For organizations that just want to check the BC box, maybe AI really is all that and a bag of chips. For companies that want a program that will actually enable them to recover quickly
from an outage, minimizing the impact on their operations, revenue, and reputation, knowledgeable human leadership is a must.
AI’s Strengths and Weaknesses
None of this is to say that AI has nothing to offer us. It’s a great support tool. It can create foundational templates, delve into the standards, and do many other basic tasks, allowing BC practitioners to focus on higher-level activities. But it’s important that we understand its limitations.
AI needs human guidance to work properly. Somebody has to ask the questions and provide direction before the AI interface will perk up and start beavering away. Writing good prompts is an art form all its own, an art only an intelligent, knowledgeable person can practice.
Another one of AI’s weaknesses is, it lacks the ability to skillfully extract data from human sources. It is missing the human touch needed to get people to share their unique knowledge and insights. AI can’t form a human connection with an SME, ask follow-up questions, make intuitive leaps, know when to lighten the mood with small talk or a joke, ramp up the energy level, push for better answers, create a collaborative atmosphere, ferret out details about the company culture, prod executives to identify their priorities, and read body language.
The importance of these skills is obvious when we recall that a BC program is only as good as the data it’s based on. The data that makes each organization unique—and which requires each BC program to be unique—comes from human sources.
At least for the time being, AI lacks the ability to obtain this critical information. Therefore it’s incapable of independently producing BC materials that go beyond the generic. And generic is useless when it comes to protecting an organization’s valuable assets from the impact of a disruption.
How a BC Planner Can Use AI
It’s been a while since I worked as a BC planner. If I were still in that role, I would definitely look into using AI, especially if I was a one-person team. But I would limit its use to mundane tasks such as collecting data, doing research, and sending out emails.
I might experiment with getting someone to help me program a tool so it could conduct interviews for the less critical entities, while keeping in mind its pitfalls and limitations. And even with these business units, I’d still want to get to know the people and their concerns.
Additional AI Pitfalls
A few closing thoughts on the subject of AI and BC:
- Any organization that uses these tools should be cautious about the security of the data they feed in and ask them to analyze.
- Another possible pitfall I see is, I can imagine BC people leaning on them too much, losing their ability and willingness to reach out and interact with people.
The Enduring Value of People Power
AI has its place in business continuity planning, but it is far from a replacement for human expertise. AI can handle routine tasks and provide valuable support, but the heart of an effective BC program relies on human skills like judgment, collaboration, and the ability to extract unique insights from people.
Organizations that want a truly resilient BC program must blend AI's capabilities with the indispensable talents of experienced BC professionals. Ultimately, it's the human touch that makes a BC program robust and effective in the face of disruptions.
Further Reading
Michael Herrera
Michael Herrera is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of MHA. In his role, Michael provides global leadership to the entire set of industry practices and horizontal capabilities within MHA. Under his leadership, MHA has become a leading provider of Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery services to organizations on a global level. He is also the founder of BCMMETRICS, a leading cloud based tool designed to assess business continuity compliance and residual risk. Michael is a well-known and sought after speaker on Business Continuity issues at local and national contingency planner chapter meetings and conferences. Prior to founding MHA, he was a Regional VP for Bank of America, where he was responsible for Business Continuity across the southwest region.
