Business leaders are confronting a new operating reality: one where war, inflation, AI and supply chain shocks are no longer exceptional events, but part of the baseline.
CNBC spoke to more than 30 CEOs, business executives and industry leaders at the annual Converge Live event in Singapore last week.
Across sectors — banking, energy, shipping, technology and manufacturing — a clear theme emerged: uncertainty is no longer episodic. It is structural.
For DBS CEO Tan Su Shan, who runs Southeast Asia’s largest bank, the lesson is simple.
“If you are a manager, manage for maximum flexibility. Because guess what, you don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow,” she said. “Stress test, stress test, stress test, so be ready for the worst case scenario.”
1. A world of constant shocks
Executives said the cadence of crises has accelerated, from the pandemic to trade wars, and now geopolitical conflict.
“Long-term planning is becoming more and more difficult,” said Stanley Szeto, chairman of apparel manufacturer Lever Style.
Companies are increasingly abandoning traditional planning cycles. “We kind of threw our three-year and five-year plan out the window,” another executive said.
Instead, leaders are operating in a state of permanent contingency planning.
“It’s no longer ‘just in time’, it’s ‘just in case’,” said Thomas Knudsen, managing director for Asia of jewelry giant Pandora.
That shift is visible across industries: supply chains are being duplicated, inventory strategies rewritten, and logistics rerouted, often at higher cost.
2. Supply chains are under strain and getting costlier
Nowhere is the disruption more visible than in global trade.
More than “2,000 vessels in the Persian Gulf [are] stuck,” said Captain Rajalingam Subramaniam, CEO of shipping services firm Fleet Management Limited, with “nearly between 20,000 to 30,000 mariners” affected.
“It is going to be higher for longer in terms of supply chain cost,” he warned.
For manufacturers, that is already feeding through into inflationary pressure.
“We produce garments … and to the extent that shipping is disrupted, then the cost goes up,” Lever Style’s Szeto said. “Material prices have been going up … so … it’s very inflationary.”
Companies are adapting, but often at a price. Lever Style, for instance, has sharply increased the use of air freight despite higher costs compared to sea transport, prioritizing speed and flexibility.
“The agility of adaptation is key,” Knudsen said.
Some executives were blunt about where those costs will end up: “Ultimately, it will all be passed to the consumer,” Knudsen added.
3. Inflation is testing the consumer
Executives serving mass-market consumers said demand has not cracked, but behavior is changing.
Hans Patuwo, CEO of Indonesia-based superapp GoTo, said the country’s affluent shoppers remain resilient, while lower-income consumers are helped by government support. The middle segment, however, is shifting.
“Now they are willing to sacrifice assortment. They are willing to sacrifice speed for cheap,” he said.
Martha Sazon, CEO of GCash operator Mynt, said consumers in the Philippines are “really being very selective” about their purchases, with government subsidies and overseas remittances helping cushion the blow.
Asked to rate the ASEAN consumer’s resilience, Sazon put it at seven out of 10. Patuwo agreed: “There’s enough history in Indonesia of shocks, and we have learned now how to adapt and overcome.”
4. AI is an opportunity, but also a threat
Most of the CEOs and executives CNBC spoke to said they were grappling with AI, whether as a cost saver, growth driver, cybersecurity risk or existential threat to their business models.
In software, investors warned that traditional SaaS models are under pressure as AI agents reshape how companies buy and use software.
“Product is becoming less of a moat,” said Magnus Grimeland, founder and CEO of Antler, a global early-stage VC firm. “The people who don’t have that distribution mode and cannot reinvent themselves will really, really struggle.”
Daisy Cai, general partner at tech investment firm B Capital, said Software as a Service (SaaS) companies may increasingly have to charge by outcome rather than on a per-user basis, or “seats.” “Traditional SaaS is based on per-seat model,” she said, but with agents, software is “no longer charged by seats.”
Still, other executives whom CNBC spoke to emphasized that AI is not simply about job cuts, but implementing adequate guardrails.
5. Cyber and trust are keeping CEOs up
Cybersecurity emerged as one of the most urgent concerns, particularly as AI accelerates the speed and scale of attacks.
DBS’ Tan said the team is “constantly red teaming” and taking a paranoid approach to cyber risks.
She noted that the ultimate differentiator in an AI-saturated world will be trust. “Everybody has access to AI, everybody has tech, and everybody can get access to great talent, and knowledge is ubiquitous,” she said.
“My cyber head says, you know, ‘inside is the outside’. And just, trust nothing, trust nobody,” she said.
In a defense and cyber panel at Converge, Brendan Laws, COO of Blackpanda, an Asia-based cybersecurity firm, said the cyberattack chain is accelerating as tools become more widely available.
“Response generally is a little bit behind offense at the moment,” he said.
6. Energy security is back at the center
The oil price shock triggered by the Iran war has also sharpened the debate around energy resilience and the transition toward renewable sources.
TK Chiang, CEO of Hong Kong-based power producer CLP, said the need to achieve energy security is accelerating investment in renewables, but argued that diversification – including gas, nuclear and carbon capture – remains important.
Assaad Razzouk, CEO of Gurin Energy, a Singapore-based renewables firm, pushed back, saying renewables and storage are already winning out globally against more traditional forms on cost and scale.
“We added enough renewable energy in 2025 to take care of 100% of all new electricity demand,” he said.
Both sides agree that demand for energy is rising sharply, particularly from AI and data centers, adding urgency to the challenge.
7. The leadership playbook is changing
If there was one conclusion shared across industries, it was that the world is not returning to the pre-crisis norm.
Instead, companies are adapting to a new reality defined by volatility, fragmentation and rapid technological change. For leaders, that means the challenge is no longer just navigating the next shock. It is convincing employees, customers and investors that they can still adapt when the next one arrives.
Former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau framed the biggest risk more broadly: people losing faith in their ability to shape the future.
“What keeps me up is the fact that so many people are being convinced that they don’t matter anymore,” he said.