Closing the Year in the Gray Zone: What to Watch Heading into 2027

As 2026 draws to a close, join ERI’s analysts and leadership team for the final quarterly update of our Strategic Intelligence Estimate 2026: Business in the Gray Zone – and a first look at the risks shaping 2027.

In January, we forecast a year in which states and non-state actors would increasingly operate in the space between peace and war, using proxies, sabotage, economic coercion, regulation and technology to pursue their aims. Much of that held: trade and export controls were wielded as instruments of state power, AI-enabled threats accelerated faster than expected, and companies found themselves both targets and tools of geopolitical competition. But 2026 also changed course. Open state-on-state conflict, from the US-Iran confrontation to the continuing war in Ukraine, played a bigger role than our gray zone framing anticipated, and frontier AI forced even permissive regulators to rethink their approach.

This session takes a brief, candid look at what the year revealed before turning to what matters most now: the risks and indicators organizations should be watching through the final weeks of 2026 and into 2027. It comes at a pivotal moment, just after Brazil’s presidential runoff and days before the US midterm elections, as the US-China trade truce approaches its renewal point and as companies finalize 2027 budgets and plans.

Our experts will cover three watchlists: conflict, coercion and political risk; economic warfare and corporate exposure across trade, finance, supply chains and regulation; and technology and AI as gray zone enablers. Expect forward-looking analysis, real-time insights, and an opportunity to engage directly with our experts ahead of the launch of Strategic Intelligence Estimate 2027 in mid-November.