Reports2026 People Readiness Report
Report Overview
Kyndryl's second annual People Readiness Report examines the gap between AI deployment and AI outcomes across global enterprises. Conducted by Edelman Intelligence on behalf of Kyndryl, the survey covered 1,100 senior business and technology leaders - including CEOs, CFOs, CIOs, and CTOs - across eight countries. Half of respondents represented companies with more than $1 billion in annual revenue. The report covers industries including financial services, healthcare, insurance, manufacturing, and telecommunications.
Key Findings
On deployment vs. outcomes
57% of enterprises now have AI embedded in core business processes or deployed broadly across the enterprise - up from 35% just one year ago. Only 11% have achieved both of their top two AI objectives. The deployment curve is steep. The outcomes curve is flat.
On workforce readiness
Only 23% of business leaders say their workforce is fully prepared for AI - down six points from 2025. As deployment accelerates, confidence in readiness is declining. More AI in the operation, less certainty that the people using it are equipped to use it well.
On investment scale
Worldwide AI investment is forecast to total $2.52 trillion in 2026 - a 44% year-over-year increase. The capital is moving fast. The outcomes data is not keeping pace with the spending.
On what works
The report identifies a consistent pattern among organizations achieving AI objectives: they redesign work rather than just adding AI to existing processes, they manage the organizational change that AI requires rather than treating it as a technology deployment, and they build governance and trust structures deliberately rather than reactively.
On governance
Nearly four in five respondents agreed that the pace of AI development will outpace their organization's ability to govern it. That is not a future concern - it is a current reality for most organizations in the survey.
Why This Matters for Enterprise Leaders
The 57% deployment / 11% objectives achieved gap is the starkest version of the enterprise AI productivity paradox available in the current research. More than half of enterprises have AI running in their core processes. Barely one in ten has achieved what they set out to achieve with it.
The workforce readiness decline is counterintuitive but important. As more AI is deployed, the gap between deployment and readiness is widening rather than closing. This happens when technology is deployed without the operational redesign and change management that determines whether people can actually use it effectively.
Anterra's Take
The organizations achieving their AI objectives in Kyndryl's data are doing the same thing our most successful projects have in common: they redesigned the work first, then deployed the AI into a process that was built to use it. The technology is not the hard part. The organizational design is the hard part - and it is consistently underfunded relative to the technology investment.
The governance finding is directly relevant to the work we do in regulated industries. Organizations that are building AI governance reactively - after deployment, in response to problems - are in a structurally worse position than those that designed governance into the architecture from the start.
Source: Kyndryl / Edelman Intelligence, 2026 People Readiness Report. Survey of 1,100 senior business and technology leaders across 8 countries, March–April 2026.
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