From Automation to Anticipation: The Role of Generative AI in Business Continuity Planning

Business Continuity Planning (BCP) has traditionallyfocused on codifying processes and recovery playbooks, thenexercising them periodically. This static approach can lag thepace of change across cloud platforms, vendors, and socio-technical dependencies. Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI)enables a shift from automating predefined steps to anticipatingdisruption by expanding scenario spaces, streamlining tabletopdesign, harmonizing runbooks, and maintaining live dependencyknowledge. This paper presents an integration blueprint thataligns GenAI with ISO 22301’s plan-do-check-act cycle and withthe NIST AI Risk Management Framework and the GenerativeAI Profile for governance. We describe a reference architectureleveraging retrieval-augmented generation over enterprise sources,outline evaluation metrics for scenario coverage, playbook quality,and exercise outcomes, and discuss risks such as hallucination, dis-closure, monoculture, and prompt injection. The paper concludeswith equations, evaluation methods, and a governance-alignedroadmap showing how organizations can move from automationto anticipation responsibly.