RESEARCH REPORT
Resilience Redefined: From readiness to reinvention
5-MINUTE READ
June 12, 2025
In brief
- Accenture research reveals that while resilience is rebounding to post-pandemic highs, the essential capabilities supporting it are eroding.
- Resilience is becoming misaligned as companies invest in some capabilities while neglecting others leading to critical vulnerabilities.
- Companies that embrace adaptive resilience outperform their peers during times of volatility.
A paradox is emerging
Amidst a myriad of business, economic and geopolitical shocks, Accenture research shows resilience rebounding to post-pandemic highs.
But these gains mask a deeper vulnerability. While companies appear more resilient on the surface, many are becoming fractured, misaligned and stagnant beneath it.
01
Fractured resilience: Gap widening, leaders surging
The divide between strong and weak organizations is widening, with the latter falling further behind on the Accenture Resilience Index.
Our research quantifies what many leaders intuitively understand: Resilience delivers its greatest value in times of disruption—Truly resilient organizations consistently outperform their peers during high-stress periods, delivering superior Return on Resilience (RoRes)—further positioning them for reinvention.
02
Misaligned resilience: A patchwork, not a system
Only 4% of companies that have improved their resilience in the recent recovery are advancing across all resilience dimensions—clear evidence that resilience is becoming more fragmented than in past recoveries.
Today, the greatest vulnerabilities are emerging in people and operational resilience—the foundational layers of adaptability and execution.
Technology resilience—Building the base for reinvention: Since the pandemic, technology resilience is a top priority for business leaders, driven by AI, data capabilities, cybersecurity and most recently next-generation AI, including agentic architecture.
Commercial resilience—Balancing cost pressure and pricing power: Commercial resilience is under immediate pressure as companies must quickly decide which costs to absorb and which to pass on due to rising tariffs, increasing input costs and fluctuating demand.
People resilience—Undervalued and undercut: In the race to adopt gen AI and agentic technologies, many organizations are prioritizing technology investments without a parallel focus on people. Our research shows that companies that strengthen both talent and technology are four times more likely to achieve long-term profitable growth.
Operational resilience—A critical blind spot: Our Resilience Index shows a sustained decline in this capability since before the pandemic. The new benchmark for operational resilience, and one that many organizations are struggling to meet, is the real-time flexibility to shift, reroute or reconfigure operations in response to sudden changes.
03
Stagnating resilience: A new baseline emerges
The definition of resilience is evolving rapidly across three of the four core capabilities that most directly drive enterprise resilience during disruption—technology, people and operations—as new realities reshape what it takes to stay competitive:
- Technology: Deep integration of gen AI capabilities into core business processes and adoption of agentic architectures.
- People: How effectively human and AI agents can collaborate within dynamic, augmented systems.
- Operations: Ability to pivot supply chains, shift production and reconfigure partnerships quickly as conditions change.
04
Adaptive resilience for a new era
The future belongs to companies that embrace adaptive resilience, treating volatility as a fuel transforming instability into momentum for growth and increased competitiveness. To achieve it, companies need to:
- Reframe volatility as a strategic advantage by viewing uncertainty as a signal to act.
- Build multipolar operating models not in reaction to crises, but to stay ahead of them.
- Invest in people, not just platforms by treating talent as a source of strategic advantage, not a cost to manage.
- Foster cultures that normalize disruption approaching resilience not as a safety net but as a springboard for innovation.
The risks of inaction are real. Those that embrace adaptive resilience won’t just withstand disruption: They’ll use it to lead, to grow and to shape the future, driving reinvention on their own terms.
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