| The Stress Test

Gritt Consulting - Economic Scenario Diagnostic

The Stress Test

Most business leaders are building for a world that is quietly being replaced. Not dramatically - gradually, then suddenly. The question isn't whether AI and economic disruption will reshape your market. It's whether you'll be ahead of it, or caught by it. This diagnostic gives you an honest, data-grounded picture of where your business stands - so you can make deliberate decisions rather than reactive ones.

Built on authoritative research

Primary source
Investing Through Disruption — Angel Investors Bristol Five months of research by the six-person AIB AI Working Group, published May 2026. The three scenarios below are drawn directly from this framework. The sources beneath corroborate it, they don't originate it.
Optimist case
Goldman Sachs & McKinsey Global Institute AI drives productivity gains broadly distributed across the economy. Net job creation exceeds displacement by 2030.
Base case
IMF & World Economic Forum 92 million roles displaced, 170 million created - but the lag between the two is seven to ten years, not two to three. 40% of global jobs face meaningful AI exposure.
Pessimist case
WEF Four Futures for Jobs (January 2026) / IMF SDN2024 / OECD Skills Outlook Steady AI progress meets a workforce lacking critical skills. Gains concentrate within businesses and geographies with AI expertise. Structural skills gaps produce permanent inequality. GDP grows; the middle market does not.

The three scenarios

The Co-Pilot Economy AI augments workers, new jobs emerge fast, SMEs capture real productivity gains. 17.5%
The Long Rotation Displacement is real, recovery is slow. The middle market spends a decade under pressure. Current trajectory 55%
The Permanent Split Growth happens but the gains go to capital. Workers and SMEs are left behind. 27.5%
~25 Questions
6 Dimensions scored
3 Economic scenarios

Stress Test Complete

Your Results

Here is your risk profile across six structural dimensions, and how that profile plays out under each of the three economic scenarios most likely to shape the next five to ten years.

Section 1 - Your Risk Profile

This is your business as it currently stands. These scores reflect the structural characteristics of your operation - independent of what the economy does. The shape of this diagram is as important as any single number. Dots that appear in red are dimensions scoring above 60% exposure.

Section 2 - How Your Profile Plays Out

Your risk profile is fixed. What changes across the three scenarios below is which of your vulnerabilities get tested, and how severely. The scenarios are three different stress tests applied to the same business.

Section 3 - Your Priority

One thing. Not five. The businesses that try to fix everything at once fix nothing.

Priority Flag -

What this diagnostic cannot tell you

This tool measures the structural resilience of your business as it currently operates. What it cannot measure is whether the market you are operating in will still be the right market in five years.

The businesses that fail most completely are often not the ones with weak balance sheets or poor pricing power. They are the ones that built something genuinely excellent in a market that was quietly becoming less relevant - and whose leaders were too close to what they had built to see it clearly until the evidence was undeniable. By that point the options had narrowed considerably.

No diagnostic tool can surface that risk. It requires someone asking you a different set of questions - not about how resilient your business is, but about whether you are pointing in the right direction.

The questions worth sitting with are these:

  • Are the industries and businesses you serve growing as a proportion of the economy, or are they mature, consolidating, or structurally shrinking - and have you looked at that data recently rather than assuming the answer?
  • Where is the competition coming from that wasn't there three years ago - not just direct competitors but adjacent businesses, technology tools, or new business models serving your customers' underlying needs in a different way?
  • If you were starting your business today from scratch, knowing what you know about where the economy is heading, would you build the same thing for the same customers - or would you build something different?

If those questions produce discomfort rather than confidence, that is useful information. The structural diagnostic above is one half of the picture. The strategic conversation - the one that asks whether you are building the right business for the world that is coming - is the other half.

The full picture

One priority is your starting point.
Not your finish line.

A complete diagnostic report - covering all six vulnerability dimensions with specific action points, sector benchmarks, and a prioritised restructuring or repositioning agenda - is available through a working session with Marc Richard.

Start that conversation