Tech Resilience: The CEO & PE Agenda | Silvio Fontaneto

There is a conversation happening in boardrooms across Europe and North America that, until recently, would have been unthinkable. It is not about growth strategy, M&A pipelines, or talent acquisition. It is about maps — specifically, about how dangerously few executives actually know what lies beneath the surface of their company's technological infrastructure.

For decades, IT systems were architected around a single governing principle: efficiency at scale. Global supply chains, cloud consolidation, best-in-class vendors regardless of geography — the logic was sound when the world was, by and large, open. Today, that logic has become a liability. The fragmentation of global trade, the weaponization of technology standards, and the deepening rivalry between major economic blocs have turned what was once an optimization exercise into a strategic exposure of the first order.

This is not a CIO problem. It is a CEO problem. It is a board problem. And for those of us in Private Equity, it is increasingly a deal problem.

The Illusion of Visibility

Ask a CEO whether they know their critical technology vendors. Most will say yes. Ask them whether they know the vendors of those vendors — the software libraries embedded in their core platforms, the data centers hosting their backup infrastructure, the third-party authentication tools their SaaS providers quietly rely on — and the confidence typically evaporates.

This is what risk professionals call "nth-party exposure," and it is far more common than most organizations care to admit. A mid-sized manufacturing company in Germany may believe its ERP system is solidly European, only to discover that a critical module depends on an open-source library maintained by a team in a jurisdiction that has become geopolitically sensitive overnight. A financial services firm may have impeccable primary infrastructure, with backup systems that route through a subcontractor operating in an area of rising political instability.

The map most companies carry in their heads does not match the territory their operations actually inhabit.

AI as Both Risk and Solution

Here is where the conversation becomes particularly complex — and where my sociological lens on organizations proves useful.

When organizations adopt AI tools from third-party providers, they are not just importing software. They are importing the geopolitical footprint of whoever trained that model, wherever those servers sit, and under whatever legal jurisdiction that provider operates. An enterprise integrating a large language model from a provider with ambiguous data residency practices is making a risk decision — they just may not know it.

But AI is also, paradoxically, one of the most powerful instruments available for mapping and managing the very risks it can introduce. Today's AI-powered contract analysis tools can scan thousands of vendor agreements to surface hidden dependencies. Graph-based AI systems can map data flows across an organization's entire technology stack in hours, producing dynamic risk maps that would have taken months to build manually. The static vendor inventory — once the gold standard of IT risk management — is becoming obsolete. What organizations need now is a living model of their technological exposure, updated in real time as their vendor landscape evolves.

The question for leadership is not whether to use AI in this context. It is whether they are using it strategically enough.

Designing for Flexibility, Not Just Efficiency

The architectural response to geopolitical fragmentation is increasingly well-understood, even if execution remains challenging. The model that is gaining traction among the most forward-thinking organizations involves separating a global operational "core" — brand, product logic, centralized analytics — from a set of modular, localizable "layers" that can be adapted or substituted depending on the regulatory, political, or operational context of a given market.

An e-commerce company, for example, might maintain a unified product catalog and customer experience framework globally, while running separate, localized payment processing and customer data management systems that can be switched or replicated without disrupting the core. This is not redundancy for its own sake. It is optionality — and in a fragmented world, optionality has real financial value.

Vendor strategy must evolve in parallel. The traditional selection criteria of cost, capability, and track record remain necessary, but they are no longer sufficient. Organizations need to understand the geopolitical "passport" of each critical vendor: where they are domiciled, what jurisdictions their infrastructure operates under, and what exposure they carry to sanctions, export controls, or regulatory fragmentation. The concept of "friend-shoring" — prioritizing suppliers in geopolitically aligned or stable regions — is moving from trade policy rhetoric into IT procurement practice. Backup vendors for mission-critical functions are no longer a nice-to-have. They are part of the resilience architecture.

Yes, this costs more. But the relevant benchmark is not the cost of the backup vendor — it is the cost of the disruption you avoid.

A Note for Private Equity: Due Diligence Has Changed

For those of us working with PE funds and their portfolio companies, the implications are direct and urgent.

Technology due diligence has always been part of the acquisition playbook, but it has typically focused on the obvious: Is the tech stack modern? Is there technical debt? Is the architecture scalable? These questions remain valid. But they now need to sit alongside a different set of questions, ones that map the target company's geopolitical technology exposure.

Where does the company's critical data reside, and under whose legal jurisdiction? What are the third and fourth-tier dependencies in their core software? How rigid or modular is their architecture — can components be substituted if a key vendor becomes inaccessible? How would the business perform under a partial or full disruption of its primary cloud provider?

Companies with high exposure and low architectural flexibility represent a risk discount that should be reflected in valuation. But they also represent an opportunity — because a PE fund that understands this landscape can drive post-acquisition value creation precisely by building the resilience the target lacks.

The first hundred days post-acquisition should increasingly include a technology resilience audit: mapping nth-party dependencies, identifying single points of geopolitical failure, and beginning the architectural work to reduce concentration risk. This is not glamorous. But in a world where operational disruption can move faster than market intelligence, it is exactly the kind of structural work that separates good investment outcomes from great ones.

The New Role of the CIO

There is a leadership dimension here that deserves explicit attention. For most of its history, the CIO role has been positioned as an operational function — essential, but fundamentally in service of decisions made elsewhere. That positioning is no longer adequate.

The CIO needs a permanent seat at the risk governance table, not as a technical advisor translating acronyms, but as a strategic voice capable of mapping geopolitical scenarios onto operational and financial consequences. The analogy I use with clients is that of the CFO. A generation ago, the CFO was often seen primarily as a controller — someone who tracked numbers and ensured compliance. Today, the CFO is a strategic partner who translates operational decisions into capital allocation consequences. The CIO needs to undergo an analogous elevation: from infrastructure manager to geopolitical risk strategist.

This requires a different kind of CIO — someone who combines deep technical fluency with genuine business acumen and the ability to communicate risk in terms that resonate with boards and investors, not just engineering teams. Finding and developing this profile is one of the more interesting talent challenges I am seeing in executive search right now.

Antifragility as Competitive Advantage

The organizations that will navigate the coming decade most effectively are not the ones that build the most elaborate risk management frameworks. They are the ones that internalize a more fundamental shift: resilience is not a defensive posture. It is a source of competitive advantage.

In a fragmented world, the ability to absorb disruption — to lose a vendor, adapt to a regulatory change, or substitute a compromised technology layer without material operational impact — is a capability that translates directly into business performance. It accelerates decision-making. It reduces the risk premium that investors and partners attach to the business. It enables faster international expansion because the organization is not operationally hostage to any single geography or jurisdiction.

The companies that treat resilience by design as a strategic investment, not a cost center, will compound that advantage over time. Those that continue to optimize exclusively for efficiency — treating geopolitical risk as someone else's problem — are accumulating exposure that will eventually be repriced, either by the market or by events.

The map is not the territory. The question for every CEO and investor in the room is whether they know the difference.

Silvio Fontaneto è Strategic Advisor e Executive Search specialist in Digital, Tech e AI. Autore di "Stop Fearing AI" e della trilogia "The Vector". Da oltre 35 anni supporta organizzazioni e leader nella trasformazione tecnologica.

Esplora il Knowledge Hub completo: www.silviofontaneto.com

📬 Iscriviti alla newsletter "AI Impact on Business" per ricevere analisi settimanali: LinkedIn Newsletter

Approfondisci: www.silviofontaneto.com/articles (filtra: AI Strategy)

#AgenticAI #AIStrategy #DigitalTransformation #Leadership #FutureOfWork #AI2026

Hashtags: #AIStrategy #GeopoliticalRisk #TechResilience #PrivateEquity #CIOLeadership #DigitalTransformation #ExecutiveSearch #CorporateStrategy