Source: PR Newswire (Kyndryl) — 2026-07-17
Summary
Kyndryl's 2026 People Readiness Report, surveying 1,100 business and technology leaders across 8 countries, finds that AI adoption is significantly outpacing workforce readiness to actually use it: 57% of enterprises now have AI embedded in core processes (up from 35% a year ago), but only 23% say their workforce is fully ready, a figure that actually declined 6 points year-over-year. Only 11% of respondents hit both of their top two AI objectives, and the report identifies a small "pacesetter" cohort — 9% of respondents — that redesigns jobs around AI rather than bolting it onto existing roles.
Key Takeaways
- Core-process AI embedding jumped from 35% to 57% year-over-year, but workforce readiness moved the opposite direction, falling from roughly 29% to 23% — the gap between deployment and readiness is widening, not closing.
- Only 11% of surveyed leaders say they hit both of their top two stated AI objectives, meaning the large majority of AI initiatives are under-delivering against their own organization's stated goals.
- The 9% "pacesetter" cohort's defining trait is redesigning jobs and workflows around AI capabilities, rather than the more common pattern of adding AI tools on top of an unchanged job structure.
- The report frames workforce readiness — not model capability or deployment speed — as the actual ROI differentiator between organizations that succeed with AI and those that don't.