Boards are being handed AI usage numbers as a progress report, and three studies this year show readiness can fall while adoption climbs, because the business change is not keeping pace with the technology.
Most of the numbers that reach a board are the numbers that can look good. People love capturing how many teams are now using AI, how many agents have been built and how much of the budget we said we would spend has been spent, and the board becomes a posh PMO that gets a progress report. The thing is, when you look back, more usage often did mean that more of the change had happened. But, with AI I don't think that is the case, because it is not just about usage, it is really about whether that usage is driving outcomes.
Kyndryl published its 2026 People Readiness Report on 25 June, surveying 1,100 senior business and technology leaders across 8 countries. This survey is great because it has been done year on year, which starts to give us a trend rather than a one-off.
Adoption climbed hard. 57% now say AI is embedded in core business processes or deployed broadly across the enterprise, against 35% a year earlier who said AI was fully integrated.
Readiness went the other way over the same twelve months. Just 23% think their workforce is fully ready for AI, a six-point drop on the year before.
The same survey found that 79% agree the speed of AI will outpace their organisation's workforce, governance and operating models, and it shows in the results. Only 32% have achieved at least one of their top two AI goals, and just 11% have achieved both.
It is more evidence that this is a business challenge rather than a technology one, because the more you push the business to adopt, the bigger the change management challenge becomes. More deployment makes an organisation less ready if the roles and responsibilities, the governance, and the operating practices and processes have not changed at the same speed.
In fact, every time we deploy something new we are creating a decision that someone now has to own and a new output that someone has to challenge. That means we need to make even more sure that the business change and the technology change are happening at the same speed.
What is interesting is that different executives within the same company will have quite different views about readiness, and often they are biased by their own responsibilities. In Protiviti's latest AI Pulse Survey of nearly 800 executives, only 13% of CHROs strongly agree their job designs are ready for AI, against 28% of the C-suite as a whole. When it comes to learning it is only 14%, against 36% overall. And maybe it is no surprise that IT leaders are the most confident, by quite a big margin in this survey.
It does not mean any of them are wrong. What it means is that technology leaders are more likely to be assessing technology readiness rather than people readiness. Conversely, the HR leaders, who are seeing and listening to their people's pains, are probably looking at all of the elements that make up HR and seeing the size of the gap to be ready.
Korn Ferry surveyed 105 chief human resources officers across Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain and Kuwait in the first quarter of this year. 93% of their organisations are exploring, piloting or deploying AI in HR, and 1% consider themselves fully ready to scale it across the enterprise.
Around 60% place accountability for AI with the CIO or IT leadership, even though it is people who are using it, and only 3% give it to HR.
Read those two studies together and the gap stops being a mystery. The people who can see the readiness problem most clearly are the people with the least authority over the AI agenda.
The disagreement between your CIO and your CHRO is not noise to be resolved, it is your earliest available warning.
If those two functions are giving you materially different answers about whether the organisation is ready, you have found the gap before it costs you anything, which is the cheapest moment to find it. If they are giving you the same answer, I would want to know whether that is genuine alignment or whether only one of them was asked.
So there are three questions I would put on the agenda.
Three questions for the agenda
Ask them before the next adoption report reaches the board
Both assessments, or one?
Are we running a workforce readiness assessment alongside the technology readiness assessment, or only the second one?
Redesigned, or just given a tool?
Which roles have actually been redesigned since we deployed, as opposed to having a tool added to them?
Who owns the people half?
Who is formally accountable for the readiness half, given that most organisations have now answered that question for the technology half and left the other one open?
None of this argues for slowing down. It argues for reading your adoption numbers for what they are, which is a measure of how much you have put in rather than a measure of how ready you were to put it there.
Adoption tells you what you have deployed. It does not tell you what you have changed.
Kyndryl. 2026 People Readiness Report, released 25 June 2026, for the 57% against 35%, the 23% and its six-point fall, the 79%, and the 32% and 11% on AI goals. 1,100 senior business and technology leaders across 8 countries, fielded by Edelman Intelligence between 24 March and 30 April 2026. Kyndryl is an IT services provider publishing on the market it sells into, so treat it as commissioned research, though it was fielded independently and the year-on-year direction is the part that matters here. The chart compares the 2026 answers with the 2025 ones as Kyndryl's release does, with two caveats printed on it: in 2025 the adoption question asked whether AI was fully integrated, and the 2025 readiness figure of 29% is derived from the reported six-point drop rather than quoted. Figures as at 25 June 2026.
Protiviti. The AI-People Conundrum: Learning to Lead, Not Lag, the fifth AI Pulse Survey, fielded April 2026, released 29 July 2026, for the 13% against 28% on job design and the 14% against 36% on learning capability. Nearly 800 executives globally, more than 80% in the C-suite. One note on comparing groups: the CHRO and C-suite figures are people who strongly agree, while the IT leaders' figures are people who are positive, so they are described here as the most confident group rather than set against the other numbers directly. Figures as at 29 July 2026.
Korn Ferry. AI Adoption in Human Capital GCC 2026, fielded in the first quarter of 2026 across 105 chief human resources officers in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain and Kuwait, reported by People Matters Middle East and Consultancy-me, for the 93% and the 1%, and for the 60% and 3% accountability split. The 93% covers organisations exploring, piloting or deploying AI within HR. Figures as at Q1 2026.
Alex Collins
Co-founder & COO at RAI Digital & Infinite PL · Ex-EY Consulting Partner · Writing on agentic AI, venture building, logistics platforms and transformation leadership.
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