Geopolitics, Artificial Intelligence, and the Reconfigured C-Suite
RESEARCH NOTES:
Geopolitics and the C-Suite
On 16 July 2025, the World Economic Forum published an article entitled “Why every company now needs a Chief Geopolitical Officer.” The author, William Dixon, a fellow with the Royal United Services Institute in London, argued that business needs a new type of c-suite executive to help navigate an increasingly fraught international order. Dixon’s analysis followed from the UK Cabinet Office’s guidance on Chronic Risks Analysis, published a week earlier, and the World Economic Forum’s own Global Risks Report, released earlier this year.
All three cited current political and strategic ructions. Per Dixon: “When both governments and international institutions are explicitly warning businesses about geopolitical risks, traditional corporate approaches to navigating international relations are no longer sufficient. The solution isn't merely better government relations or enhanced risk management; it's the emergence of an entirely new C-suite role.” The “Chief Geopolitical Officer” (or CGO) idea, proffered by the Geneva Center for Security Policy, a Swiss think tank, in a 2024 report, is a variation on a theme that’s received generous airplay.
Dixon, the World Economic Forum, the UK Cabinet Office, and the Geneva Center for Security Policy are in good company. International relations have been a fraying at the edges since well before Hans Morgenthau, Hedley Bull, and E.H. Carr gave it shape. Once in a while the edges start looking battered enough that talk turns almost inevitably to geopolitics, the nine superpowered lives of the British geographer Halford Mackinder, and what Canadian historian Michael Ignatieff once referred to as “travel writing from hell.” The reading list is long, varied, and colourful. Mileage may very when it comes to the lessons of history, but there are plenty of them, and we can put them to good use to instruct and inform.
We already know, for example, that invocations of geopolitics aren’t new. Each new iteration, moreover, is a product of its own time, inflected with the political, financial, technological, and violent currents of the day. We’re in the middle of one now. Geopolitics practice teams have become standard features of global investment funds, management consultancies, and law firms. McKinsey & Company’s view of the issue is illustrative. “Geopolitical conditions have always influenced companies’ fortunes,” states the landing page of McKinsey’s dedicated geopolitics practice, “but since the end of the Cold War, they’ve taken a back seat to macroeconomic, strategic, and operational concerns. No longer.”
Ian Bremmer, founder and President of Eurasia Group, knows a thing or two about this. Writing in a Time magazine column earlier this month: “In the past, national power has depended on geography, relative military strength, the cohesion of tribal identities, population size, the reliability of social safety nets, and vulnerability to climate change. In the years to come, these attributes will matter mainly for the impact they have on establishing AI dominance. The scramble for AI inputs, and the ability to deny rivals access to them, will determine the balance of power in the 21st century.” Ships and cannon are part of the equation, but Bremmer’s point hits the nail squarely on the head. Still, there’s a lot to unpack here.
Suffice it to say that the technology inflections will be unavoidably central, as they have been during previous geopolitical interludes, to a reconfigured c-suite’s concerns.
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