In 2025, businesses will embrace risk. Here's why

The right conditions for positive risk-taking are already on the horizon Image: Wikimedia Commons/Patisserie
- In 2025, with economic recovery high on the agenda worldwide and many countries having confirmed their leaders for the next few years, we will see businesses embracing risk.
- The right conditions for positive risk-taking are already on the horizon in the UK and the US.
- The growth in artificial intelligence will enable businesses to experiment and take risks in an increasingly regulated and safe space.
If one word could characterize the climate of 2024, it is uncertainty. More than 80 countries went to the polls and, in certain cases, businesses operated against a backdrop of dramatic shifts in power.
Uncertain periods understandably breed caution, but fear of taking risks during times like these represents lost opportunities for businesses.
In 2025, with economic recovery high on the agenda worldwide and many countries having confirmed their leaders for the next few years, we will see businesses embracing risk – using the macroeconomic conditions we are faced with as a time to innovate, experiment and drive growth.
Down markets are in fact fertile grounds for ambitious businesses looking to grow. Modern-day giants and well-known brands such as Disney, IBM, AirBnB and Uber were created in down markets. As an entrepreneur, being open to taking risks is part of the job description, so I’m excited about this.
The right conditions for positive risk-taking are already on the horizon in the UK. In its manifesto, the Labour Party – now in government – announced plans to create a Regulatory Innovation Office (RIO), which will allow more innovative companies – particularly in tech – to bring their cutting-edge products and services to market by reducing red tape and speeding up decision-making.
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In tandem, a crucial pillar of the strategy of the incoming Lord Mayor of London, Alastair King, whose role is to champion the City’s businesses, will be ambition. This entails working with regulators, CEOs and chief risk officers to challenge businesses to be less averse to risk.
Across the pond, we’ve seen President-elect Trump reaffirming his commitment to strengthening American leadership in artificial intelligence (AI) and cryptocurrency, having established the American AI Initiative via Executive Order 13859 while he was in office in February 2019 and vowing to create a “bitcoin and crypto presidential advisory council”. In December 2024, Masayoshi Son, co-founder and CEO of Softbank, which is an investor in OakNorth (through Vision Fund I), pledged to invest $100bn in the US over the next four years with an aim to create 100,000 jobs focused on AI and related infrastructure.

As AI adoption becomes increasingly normalized, we will see previously sceptical companies embrace it as they realize that its capabilities to analyse, draw conclusions and make predictions from vast troves of data will, in fact, improve their exposure to risk.
Businesses are already reaping rewards from AI. Take payment processing firm Klarna for example, whose AI assistant takes on two-thirds of its customer service chats, approximately 2.3 million conversations so far. It has addressed customers’ queries and resolved their issues in record time – under two minutes – and almost 6x faster than previously.
Enthusiasm around the technology’s potential to drive a new wave of growth has helped tech stocks to build again post-Covid and analysts expect this upward trend to continue.
Of course, the greatest fear in taking any sort of risk is that of failure or unintended consequences. This fear has held businesses back from embracing AI, despite the boom in interest.
However, what distinguishes AI from other areas such as cryptocurrency, which developed outside the regulatory sphere, is that concrete steps are being taken to regulate it to allow experimentation and risk-taking with necessary safety guardrails.
How is the World Economic Forum creating guardrails for Artificial Intelligence?
In 2025, with governments around the world confirmed to be in power for the next few years, we will see even more of this progress. We will see more businesses embracing failure that they can learn from as part of the path to growth – what Professor of Leadership at Harvard Business School Amy Edmondson describes as the “right kind of wrong” in her book of the same title.
New governments and those re-elected will make a determined effort to leave recent macroeconomic turbulence in the past. The proliferation of AI means there will be chances to take big swings; even if they don’t work out, the learning experiences for businesses will be incredible.
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Leila Toplic
February 6, 2025