2026 People Readiness Report: The AI Adoption-Readiness Gap Widens
Kyndryl's global survey of 1,100 senior business and technology leaders across eight countries finds only 23% believe their workforce is ready to use AI effectively — a 6-point drop from 2025 — even as adoption climbed to 57% of enterprises and 77% report generative AI has scaled across multiple functions. Leaders rate their IT infrastructure readiness far higher than their people readiness, and a small "Pacesetter" cohort pulls away from the rest.
Readiness is falling as adoption rises — a widening rather than narrowing gap, which argues against "wait and see" capability-building. The bottleneck on AI return is shifting from technical deployment to human and governance readiness, so capability builders should prioritise readiness diagnostics over further tool rollout.
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