How businesses are shifting from optimisation to navigation, reducing dependencies & building resilience

Listen closely to conversations about competitiveness, and a pattern emerges.

Whether they begin with artificial intelligence, energy, trade or industrial policy, they rarely stay there for long - the conversation soon turns to resilience, dependencies and trust. Different starting points. Remarkably similar conclusions. Business leaders are more clear-eyed about this moment than public conversation gives them credit for. Few expect the uncertainty to lift. What has changed is the response to it: a shift from optimising what already exists to navigating conditions that keep shifting underneath it.

Raise the sails


Georg Knill, president of the Federation of Austrian Industries, recently captured the shift at the Salzburg Summit with a simple metaphor. Last year he spoke about leaders needing a compass. This year he added the next step: a compass is no use if the ship stays in the harbour.

Leaders still have to raise the sails. That is the real shift: from optimiser to navigator. Optimising assumes conditions are stable enough to fine-tune around. Navigating assumes disruption will arrive without warning and the job is to hold course regardless.

More resilient economies

Energy makes this shift concrete. A few years ago, renewables were framed almost entirely as climate policy. Now they are just as much about sovereignty. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has driven that home more forcefully than Russia's invasion of Ukraine did: a stark reminder of how dependent much of the world remains on Middle Eastern fossil fuels, and a trigger for a far more serious push to diversify supply. The economics help: solar and wind are now cheaper than fossil fuel generation in most markets.

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One figure stands out. Fatih Birol, head of the International Energy Agency, recently observed that roughly three quarters of all power plants brought online last year were wind and solar. India reflected that momentum, adding a record 55.29 gigawatts of renewable capacity to March 2026 - nearly double the previous year's record - and has already reached 50% of its power capacity from non-fossil sources, five years ahead of its 2030 target.

Reducing dependence on others, and on fossil fuels specifically, while accelerating electrification, is no longer a climate story. It is a resilience story.

Businesses are learning the same lesson, reducing dependence on single suppliers, single markets, single providers. Nowhere is that lesson clearer than in AI. The conversation has moved from experimentation to scaling to a much tougher question: where is the ROI?

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That question brings governance and dependency risk into focus: how much to rely on one cloud provider, one tech stack or one jurisdiction for data? Efficiency still matters, but resilience and reliability increasingly matter just as much.

For India's technology sector, that same instinct towards diversification is a business opportunity. Companies such as Infosys, Tech Mahindra and Wipro are well placed to help clients build the diversified, multi-cloud, multi-stack architectures that resilience now demands.

Trust as an economic asset

Trust, however, is easier to lose than build. That applies to companies and increasingly to countries. Policy unpredictability carries an economic cost. When businesses cannot anticipate the rules, investment slows, long-term planning becomes harder, and confidence erodes. The contrast is stark between leaders building trust and the current US administration, which, especially since the war in Iran, has become the world's greatest source of uncertainty. For business leaders, trust is no longer an abstract value. It is becoming a practical competitive advantage. Leaders are not waiting for stability to return, because they no longer expect it. They are learning to compete without it. They are reducing dependencies before they become vulnerabilities, strengthening trust before it is tested, and learning to navigate rather than optimise. That is increasingly what competitiveness requires.

Competing without certainty

If anything, the world looks more uncertain than six months ago. The war in Iran has made the energy challenge more acute. AI stakes have risen as the cost of getting it wrong climbs. The current US administration's challenge to the postwar rules-based order is more severe. Yet, recent conversations leave room for optimism. The optimism comes from elsewhere: the resolve business leaders are showing. Those bolstering resilience now, rather than waiting for calmer conditions, are building the advantage that will define the next decade.

(The author is president and Nestle professor of strategy and political economy at IMD Business School. He will be speaking at The Economic Times World Leaders Forum in New Delhi)