Aon's CFO on the No. 1 risk keeping CEOs and finance chiefs up at night

Good morning. Ask Edmund Reese, CFO of the $75 billion professional services and risk management firm Aon, what’s keeping CEOs and finance chiefs up at night. His answer begins with a list, not a single risk.

“There’s a lot happening right now at once,” he told me. Geopolitical flare-ups in the Middle East are disrupting supply chains. The AI infrastructure boom is driving unprecedented spending on data centers. Cyber threats have climbed to the top of the corporate agenda. For today’s executives, the challenge isn’t any one risk—it’s how quickly they intersect and compound.

“We do a survey each year where we poll the top CEOs, and it’s been oscillating between geopolitical risk being the number one,” Reese said. But cyber overtook it this past year, becoming the top risk on CEOs’ minds in Aon’s latest polling, he said.

Another major concern is how AI is reshaping talent needs. “Talent is always at the top of the list for me,” Reese said. In an industry where competitors aggressively court top performers, Aon is betting that investing in employees—and equipping them with AI-powered tools—will be a competitive advantage.

“We have been on our front foot,” Reese said. AI-driven automation of invoicing, claims, and policy management contributed to the 70 basis points of margin improvement last quarter, he said. AI-enabled “risk analyzers” used during client pitches have also lifted RFP win rates by 40%, helping drive the 10 percentage points of Q2 growth that came from new clients and expanded wallet share.

Reese pointed to hiring as another sign of confidence. Aon expanded its ranks of client-facing revenue generators—brokers, producers, and consultants—by 6% last year and is targeting 4% to 8% growth in that group this year. It’s a bet that investing in client relationships today will translate into stronger growth tomorrow, even as the macroeconomic backdrop remains uncertain.

That same philosophy shapes Aon’s approach to clients. Companies don’t just want to know what risks they face, Reese said—they want to understand how those risks could affect their P&L and balance sheet, and which exposures they should retain versus transfer. As a reinsurance broker, Aon can model those scenarios with extraordinary detail, down to how a seven-story steel-and-wood building in California might perform in a 7.2-magnitude earthquake, he said. That analysis helps clients decide, asset by asset, how much risk to keep and how much to transfer to insurers or other capital providers.

For Reese, uncertainty isn’t a reason to pull back—it’s a reason to innovate. As investors questioned whether AI could eventually displace insurance brokers, Aon doubled down on its “Aon United” strategy, integrating its data, analytics, and expertise into a unified client offering.

The strategy appears to be paying off. Aon reported 5% organic revenue growth and 9% adjusted EPS growth in the second quarter, extending the momentum of its three-year strategic plan. For Reese, those results underscore a broader point: in an increasingly interconnected world, competitive advantage belongs to the firms that can understand and quantify complexity faster than everyone else.

Sheryl Estrada
Sheryl.Estrada@fortune.com

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