An Association’s Role in a Polycrisis

What are business leaders worrying about at this moment? Everything. What are they hoping to do about it? Everything, too, it seems.

That’s the key message of KPMG’s new Global CEO Outlook Survey  (opens in a new tab), released earlier this week. Asked about what they perceive to be the biggest risks to growth in the next three years, respondents gave roughly equal weight to four challenges: cybersecurity, economic uncertainty, geopolitical instability, and regulatory pressures.

“CEOs are preparing for several sources of disruption rather than organizing their response around one overriding concern,” the report says. Plainly, the age of the polycrisis is still very much with us.

In the same way that the concerns are equally distributed, so are the envisioned solutions. According to the survey, 45 percent of CEOs have increased their investment in cybersecurity; and investment in compliance (36 percent), and AI integration into operations and workflows (32 percent) aren’t far behind.

For association leaders, the findings should be a prompt to think about their own approach to cybersecurity, workforce, and AI. It’s also a reminder that association members are facing a host of understandable anxieties—what the economy and AI will do to (or for) their jobs, what kind of training they’ll need to remain resilient, and what the overall trajectory for their chosen industry is. As associations look at their programming into 2027, addressing those questions will be imperative.

If you need more evidence of that, consider the survey’s finding that while employers are optimistic about workforce growth, they’re not exactly bullish. KPMG found that 89 percent of CEOs anticipate an increase in headcount, but most (62 percent) say it will be under 5 percent. The problem is ensuring that workers are trained for their jobs. A majority (56 percent) of CEOs said that closing skills gaps are a “significant challenge,” followed by upskilling around AI (52 percent), and employee recruitment and retention (47 percent).

The good news is that employees are generally on board with the changes CEOs say they need to make: The survey found that workforce resistance is low when it comes to AI implementation, and around half of CEOs plan to do more around communication and training. 

In the report, KPMG Global Head of People Colm Gorman suggests that organization leaders will need to focus on creating an environment where AI is integrated into daily work. Getting there, he writes, “means investing in continuous learning, building confidence through clear communication, and helping people combine AI with human expertise, judgment, and experience to create value in new ways.”

It’s not hard to see where associations can help those organizations acquire and increase the necessary skills for this task. As AI tools become more and more a part of everyday work, associations can set the guidelines for what professionalism looks like for their members. They can also establish and promote the guardrails that make sure those same members can do that work without putting their organizations’ welfare at risk. Executives have a lot on their minds lately, and associations can ease a few of those burdens.