The IT Nerd

Kyndryl today announced the release of its second annual People Readiness Report, a global study of 1,100 senior business and technology leaders across eight countries, revealing a notable drop in workforce AI readiness and a widening gap between AI expectations and execution.

The report illustrates what leaders are doing right to ride the AI surge, and that AI success is not driven solely by different strategies, use cases or technologies – it’s driven by whether organizations redesign work and manage those changes throughout their organizations. The data also shows that trust in AI can be built through deliberate operating model and governance changes.

The findings come as companies accelerate AI adoption and invest heavily to realize value at scale. “Worldwide spending on AI is forecast to total $2.52 trillion in 2026, a 44% increase year-over-year, according to Gartner®, Inc., a business and technology insights company.”

According to the study:

• 57% say AI is embedded in core business processes or deployed broadly across the enterprise; last year, 35% said AI was fully integrated across their organizations.
• Only 32% have achieved at least one of their top two AI goals; just 11% have achieved both.

The study identifies a Pacesetters group, the 9% of organizations that have done three things: they redesign roles around AI, implement change management so the workforce understands its new operating model and has guardrails in place, and have built workforce readiness. These three behaviors are the operational foundations that consistently distinguish the organizations achieving the strongest results from AI. As they do these things, at each stage they are building the important governance frameworks. Pacesetters are roughly twice as likely to have fully implemented every governance dimension measured.

Pacesetters are:

• 1.5 times more likely to achieve AI-related revenue growth.
• 1.6 times more likely to report better innovation for products and services.

Business leaders consistently rank workforce readiness among the most challenging aspects of AI adoption:

• Just 23% of organizations think their workforces are fully ready for AI, a six-point drop from last year.
• And 79% agree that the speed of AI will outpace their organizations’ workforce, governance and operating models.

The risk of falling behind is increasing as more organizations adopt autonomous AI agents.

• 81% of organizations expect AI agents to make impactful decisions for their organizations within the next year, but today just 25% completely trust AI systems operating without human oversight.

Readying workforces for AI-enabled workplaces

The report identifies actions that organizations are taking to get their workforces ready for an AI-enabled workplace:

• Redesigning roles for the future: 61% say their organizations have already redesigned roles, and 24% are creating new roles focused on AI management.
• Addressing skills gaps: Half of leaders (52%) say it has become more challenging to find employees with the right skills to advance their AI strategy, and a third have fully implemented training programs focused on helping employees effectively collaborate with AI tools.
• Building trust through governance: A third of organizations (33%) claim they have clear policies on which decisions AI can and can’t make, and 27% are using a registry and monitoring capabilities for all their AI systems. Organizations with stronger governance assert their workforces trust more in AI strategy and execution, and high-trust organizations are significantly more likely to report transformative outcomes from their AI investments.

Learn more about People Readiness.

*Gartner Press Release, Gartner Says Worldwide AI Spending Will Total $2.5 Trillion in 2026, 15 January 2026. GARTNER is a trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates.

Kyndryl today announced an innovative capability for creating policy-governed agentic AI workflows to enable enterprises to scale agentic AI across complex and highly regulated environments. Kyndryl’s policy as code capability translates customers’ organizational rules, regulatory requirements and operational controls into machine‑readable policies that govern how agentic AI workflows execute, to support consistent, auditable and trustworthy outcomes.

Customers want to reap the benefits of integrating agentic AI into their operations, but security, compliance and control challenges inhibit trusted deployment of AI agents. In fact, 31% of customers cite regulatory or compliance concerns as a primary barrier limiting their organization’s ability to scale recent technology investments.

Kyndryl’s policy as code capability addresses these concerns by defining operational boundaries and designing agents actions to remain explainable, reviewable and aligned with the customer-defined business and regulatory requirements. This combination also helps reduce costs, accelerate decision-making, eliminate errors and power AI-native workflows within defined policy guardrails.

Policy as code is a critical element of the Kyndryl Agentic AI Framework, providing a logical enforcement layer that dynamically governs how AI agents execute, interact and operate across systems. Kyndryl’s approach to codifying compliance into enterprise workflows is strengthened by insights drawn from decades of operating complex enterprise environments and the nearly 190 million automations the company manages every month for these mission-critical systems. These operational foundations enable more reliable governance, improve agent explainability and reduce unexpected behaviors in production environments.

Embedding policy-governed agent workflows into business operations

Kyndryl policy as code enables governance of agentic workflows and is bolstered via differentiated capabilities, including:

• Deterministic execution – Agents only execute actions permitted and enforced by pre-defined policies, reducing operational risk.
• Eliminates hallucination impact – Guardrails block unpredictable or unauthorized actions along the workflow, eliminating operational impact of agentic hallucinations.
• Audit-by-design transparency – Each agent action and decision is logged and explainable, supporting compliance and oversight.
• Human supervision – Agents execute tasks aligned with established and testable policies that are observed via a dashboard to support consistent actions and decisions.

Kyndryl’s structured approach to managing agentic workflow execution supports controlled and safe deployment of policy-constrained autonomous agents in sectors such as financial operations, public services, supply chains and other mission-critical domains where reliability and predictability are essential.

Learn more by connecting with a Kyndryl Consult expert to design, implement and operate agentic AI solutions governed by the company’s enterprise-grade policies, oversight and compliance controls.

Kyndryl today unveiled Kyndryl’s Quantum Safe Assessment service to help enterprises prepare for the emerging opportunities and security threats posed by quantum computing. The new service identifies and analyzes cryptographic risk exposure across an organization’s entire IT estate, creating a customized transformation roadmap to transition to quantum-safe security through post-quantum cryptography (PQC). This supports long-term data protection and regulatory requirements.

Kyndryl’s Quantum Safe Assessment service provides a comprehensive evaluation of an organization’s digital environment to advise, prepare, design and implement quantum-safe solutions. The assessment identifies crucial systems and third-party interfaces that are most at risk, including payment gateways, customer databases, cloud infrastructure and mainframe systems, and prioritizes them based on the sensitivity of data and timeline for quantum threats.

Kyndryl collaborates with organizations to advise them on how to define processes and adopt technologies that enable quantum-safe security. Following an initial assessment, Kyndryl Consult experts can work with organizations to create, implement and manage a clear quantum-safe strategy supported by a step-by-step roadmap and enhanced digital resilience. By improving resilience and agility, this approach makes quantum readiness more accessible to organizations at any stage of their quantum journey.

Key features and capabilities of the service include:

• Encryption discovery: Identifies all encryption methods currently protecting services, applications, systems, networks and data layers across the enterprise by creating a Cryptographic Bill of Materials (CBOM) to understand where and how encryption is applied.
• Risk-based classification: Evaluates which business services are most critical for protection and most vulnerable to quantum attacks based on data sensitivity and business impact.
• Transformation roadmap: Develops a phased plan to transition to new quantum-resistant encryption standards and, ultimately, to full crypto agility.
• Zero Trust integration: Integrates quantum readiness with Kyndryl’s Zero Trust Adoption Framework to strengthen secure identity, endpoint, network and data protection.

Despite the quantum-safe urgency, there is a significant awareness gap among customers. The 2025 Kyndryl Readiness Report found that only four percent of leaders believe quantum will be the technology with the greatest impact on their businesses in the next three years, underscoring the need for proactive preparation.

Learn more about Kyndryl’s security and resiliency services.

Kyndryl in collaboration with Microsoft, today announced the findings of the third annual Global Sustainability Barometer Study, conducted by Ecosystm. The study reveals that integration-focused organizations – those that align sustainability with business strategy, empower employees and adopt advanced technologies like AI – are driving measurable business value and lasting impact in today’s rapidly changing world.

Integration-focused organizations lead the way globally

The 2025 Global Sustainability Barometer Study identifies a decisive shift from years prior: leading organizations embed sustainability into their core business processes to outperform their peers across regions and industries. These leaders turn sustainability from a side initiative into a value-creation engine, driving resilience, competitiveness and market differentiation. Notably, 78% of integration-focused organizations highlight IT as a key enabler in achieving sustainability goals, leveraging data, automation and AI for measurable impact, and 56% of IT teams now lead sustainability efforts beyond IT, up from 38% in 2024.

Key global findings

• Core driver of strategy: 62% of integration-focused organizations embed sustainability into their innovation, cost savings and resilience strategies – compared to 34% of others – transforming sustainability from a compliance requirement into a catalyst for long-term growth and competitive advantage.
• Financial gains: 59% of organizations worldwide report financial benefits from sustainability investments, primarily through operational efficiency, customer retention and new market opportunities.
• Early agentic AI adoption: Globally, 30% of all organizations are piloting or deploying agentic AI for sustainability, with early adopters reporting measurable gains in cost savings, innovation and compliance.
• Connecting policy, people, and purpose: 73% of organizations globally report strong alignment between technology and sustainability teams. By connecting departmental objectives, empowering employees and engaging stakeholders, these leaders move sustainability from a compliance exercise to a driver of business value and lasting impact.
• Regional and industry momentum: Europe leads in aligning tech modernization and AI adoption for sustainability, propelled by robust regulatory frameworks. Across all regions, countries accelerating sustainability cite clearer return on investment (ROI) or new revenue opportunities as the top drivers (67%). Additionally, industries leading in agentic AI adoption and experimentation include energy and utilities, banking and transport – with focus placed beyond energy and emissions optimization, on operational resilience, resource efficiency and sustainable product design.

The study findings align with the 2025 Kyndryl Readiness Report and recognize the deeper integration between sustainability and IT. The Readiness Report reveals that 27% businesses that invest in IT modernization achieve sustainability-based benefits through efficiency, innovation, security and compliance, while 22% cite improved energy efficiency or sustainability as a critical outcome for digital transformation ROI.

About the Global Sustainability Barometer Study
The third edition of the Global Sustainability Barometer Study, conducted by Ecosystm and commissioned by Kyndryl and Microsoft, reflects the perspectives of 1,286 enterprise leaders spanning 20 countries and nine industry groups. Conducted between August and September 2025, this study aims to provide a comprehensive view of how integration, strategy, and technology are transforming sustainability from compliance to competitive advantage.

Learn more about the study, From Planning to Progress: AI-Driven Sustainability in Practice. 

Kyndryl and Health Standards Organization (HSO), a global not-for-profit organization dedicated to improving health care quality and patient safety, today announced a collaboration to build an enterprise data platform on Microsoft Fabric hosted on Azure. This transformative initiative will enable HSO to unify its vast data resources, dramatically improving the speed and accuracy of reporting, analytics and decision-making to help it to expand its reach and support more people. 

HSO develops evidence-informed, consensus-based standards across more than 100 areas of health and social services around the world. These standards are shaped by input from patients, providers and policymakers and are supported by tools that help organizations implement and improve care delivery. Today, HSO’s standards have been adopted by 14,000 care sites globally, such as hospitals, care homes and social services sites.

The new platform will automate data workflows and enable faster, more trusted insights. It will also support advanced analytics, better forecasting, and improved visibility across the organization, so that HSO can spend more time working on activities that directly support improving health care quality.

With Kyndryl’s support, HSO is rolling out a comprehensive data governance program to strengthen data quality and support compliance, coupled with a change management strategy that encompasses stakeholder communications, skills assessments and upskilling initiatives. Together, they will create multiple proof-of-concept projects to validate AI, machine learning and business intelligence use cases.

The Kyndryl Vital team played a key role in the engagement, working side-by-side with HSO and multiple data & AI experts from Kyndryl Consult to define challenges, prototype solutions and co-develop strategies aligned with HSO’s vision. This designer-led, collaborative approach supported tailoring the platform to HSO’s needs and goals.

Kyndryl today released its second annual Kyndryl Readiness Report, drawing on responses from 3,700 senior leaders across 21 countries. The data reveals an instance of momentum and reflection ? as businesses report growing returns from AI investments while facing mounting pressure to modernize infrastructure, scale innovation efforts, reskill workforces and manage risk in an increasingly fragmented regulatory landscape.

Last year’s report revealed a critical gap between perception and preparedness: while 90% of business leaders believed their IT infrastructure was best in class, only 39% felt it was ready for future disruption. While there has been momentum ? that tension remains. This year:

• ROI on the rise, but AI stuck in experimentation phase: While 54% of organizations reported seeing positive returns on AI investments ? an increase of 12 points from 2024 ? 62% still haven’t advanced their AI projects beyond the pilot stage.
• Confidence continues to outweigh capability: While 90% say their tools and processes allow them to rapidly test and scale new ideas, more than half say their foundational technology stack holds back innovation.
• AI driving workforce transformation, but skills gaps remain: 87% say AI will “completely” transform jobs at their organizations within 12 months, even though many say their employees are not using AI frequently today and few have the technical skills necessary.
• Geopolitical pressures forcing a data pivot: While reporting clear benefits from cloud adoption, organizations are now reevaluating where and how their data is stored, processed, accessed and secured amid an increasingly fragmented regulatory landscape. Businesses are also balancing legacy infrastructure challenges, with 70% of CEOs saying they reached their cloud setup “by accident rather than design.”

AI spending rises along with ROI expectations ? with cyber resilience top of mind

Business leaders across all industries and countries say their company’s AI spending jumped 33% on average since last year, with 68% investing “heavily” in at least one form of AI. As AI investments rise, so does the pressure to show value ? and protect it. Three in five leaders say they feel more pressure this year to deliver ROI from AI than last. Their top use case? Cybersecurity.

Cloud is under pressure as geopolitical and regulatory disruption drive change

Many organizations are also revisiting their cloud infrastructure, prompted by new global regulations and growing concerns about data sovereignty. Three in four leaders report concerns about the geopolitical risks associated with storing and managing data in global cloud environments, and 65% have adjusted their cloud strategies in response ? by investing in data repatriation, reassessing vendors, and shifting toward private cloud models.

Talent and Culture ? the next readiness frontier

As leaders look to scale innovation, people readiness is emerging as a key barrier ? and a key opportunity. While nearly 9 in 10 believe AI will completely reshape jobs in the next year, only 29% feel their workforce is ready to successfully leverage the technology and concerns remain around the skills needed to succeed in this era. Many organizations are also battling cultural barriers ? with nearly half of CEOs reporting their organization stifles innovation (48%) and moves too slowly in decision-making (45%). Those pulling ahead ? dubbed “Pacesetters” in the report ? aren’t just investing in innovation. They’re uniquely prioritizing culture, upskilling and leadership alignment.

Compared to organizations who are lagging in these areas, Pacesetters are:

• 32 points less likely to cite their tech stack as a barrier
• 30 points more likely to say their cloud can adapt to new regulations
• 20 points less likely to report a cyber-related outage in the past year

To read the report, visit Kyndryl’s Readiness Report.

Methodology

The 2025 Kyndryl Readiness Report combines survey data from 3,700 senior leaders and decision-makers across 21 countries with insights from Kyndryl Bridge, the company’s AI-powered, open integration digital business platform. The Report uncovers the drivers, barriers and trade-offs that can make or break the ability of organizations to protect, sustain and accelerate their performance and future-proof their mission-critical processes.

Kyndryl today unveiled capabilities that augment the Kyndryl Agentic AI Framework and accelerate AI adoption at scale across industries. The enhancements incorporate a unique design process and an innovative engagement methodology. This enables customers to break free from limited proof-of-concept AI projects to scale real-world AI-native solutions that boost efficiency and drive business outcomes.

The company is deploying forward engineers, capabilities and intellectual property to drive rapid adoption of the expanded Agentic AI Framework with customers, leveraging differentiated methodologies through Kyndryl Vital. By co-creating customized projects that minimize time between design and deployment, Kyndryl is speeding time to value for organizations in government, banking, insurance, manufacturing and other industries.

Backed by an infrastructure-first mindset and decades of experience running mission-critical systems, Kyndryl has a proven track record of implementing AI-native workflows at scale. This foundation uniquely positions the company to deliver the step change that customers need to deploy an enterprise-grade framework with intelligent AI agents that dynamically learn, evolve, and turn insights into measurable outcomes.

In fact, Kyndryl is already seeing that a quarter of its signings contain AI-related content, including data architecture, cloud and digital workplace services.

The company is also collaborating with its global alliance partners to create joint solutions across the ecosystem that enable customers to embrace Kyndryl’s Agentic AI Framework and efficiently blend AI into their core business operations. In addition, Kyndryl is partnering with several universities globally to engage their researchers and students with a focus on educating and fostering the next generation of skilled AI professionals.

At the core of the Kyndryl Agentic AI Framework is the advanced capability that orchestrates, secures and scales a customer’s technology footprint into agentic AI workflows. This is strengthened by input from Kyndryl’s agentic ingestion capability, which extracts and analyzes the customer’s code, policies, data interdependencies, business goals and insights – including from Kyndryl Bridge. The Kyndryl Agentic AI Framework is secure-by-design, with guardian concepts – enabling autonomous, transparent and compliant operations.

The core capability helps customers deliver an agentic system with a future workforce model, including defined roles agents will play in an organization and how they will work with employees. Kyndryl’s experts use the model to identify the professional roles people will play and the skills required to deliver business outcomes in partnership with their agent counterparts.

Harnessing the model, Kyndryl’s agent builder uses the company’s industry and domain reference architectures and catalog of AI agents and agentic workflows to help make it easier for enterprises to design, test and deploy AI agents that perform tasks such as writing code, running tests, or automating complex processes. The agent builder also creates and deploys agents in harmony with compliance standards and security protocols, while ensuring they are ready for mission-critical use.

Kyndryl is furthering adoption of its Agentic AI Framework across industries by:

• Working with insurance industry customers on an agentic AI-enabled actuarial solution that creates and embeds AI agents to deliver an end-to-end intelligent, automated workflow. The agents dynamically generate regulatory filings, support proactive regulatory compliance checks and deliver insights to drive real-time analysis and decision-making.
• Developing and deploying AI agents that connect and streamline government processes spanning multiple departments, from tax and licensing to immigration and government benefits. The solution incorporates knowledge of policies and procedures, works alongside civil servants, and proactively acts to serve the needs of citizens, businesses and government employees.
• Collaborating with a banking customer to streamline and automate an intensive manual client onboarding process that involves application submission, review, validation and vetting with external parties. Using intelligent AI agents embedded within all stages of the process, the Framework is enabling the customer to streamline and accelerate onboarding time, while enhancing the overall customer experience.

Learn more about Kyndryl’s expanded and enhanced approach to enabling customer adoption of agentic AI. 

According to new research from Kyndryl, the world’s largest IT infrastructure services provider, 86% of Canadian organizations have deployed (or are planning to deploy) AI/generative AI to their mainframe environments, and more than a quarter (27%) are projecting a cost savings of more than $25 million as a result. 

Today, Kyndryl released its 2025 State of Mainframe Modernization Survey, which revealed shifting priorities when it comes to the modernization of one of IT’s oldest and most trusted innovations. Mainframes aren’t just surviving the AI era; they’re powering it and unlocking billions in ROI.

Report Highlights: 

• AI ROI: Globally, organizations anticipate $12.7B in cost savings and $19.5B in new revenue over the next three years as a result of using AI and generative AI in their mainframe environments.
  • In Canada, companies are applying AI for fraud detection, security testing, and performance optimization. Instead of replacing the mainframe, AI is enhancing its capabilities.
• Shifting strategies: Over the past year, 73% of Canadian organizations shifted their modernization strategies, and half have increased usage or made new investments.
• Growing skills gaps: Mainframe modernization requires a multi-skilled organization. 64% faced challenges in finding skills talent to effectively modernize the mainframe, with mainframe security skills the most in-demand skill for Canadian organizations.
• Regulatory influence: 88% of Canadian organizations agree that regulatory compliance is influencing decision-making regarding mainframe modernization, and 43% say it’s increasing collaboration between IT, security and compliance teams.

Why this matters: More than half (61%) of Canadian organizations have at least half of their mission-critical applications residing in the mainframe – its operability is crucial to more than three-quarters (82%) of Canadian businesses. As a result of rapidly changing geopolitical environments, market forces, and regulatory pressures, mainframe modernization has become more challenging and urgent than ever before, and AI could be a catalyst for secure, cost-effective mainframe modernization.

The full report can be found here.

About The State of Mainframe Modernization Survey

Kyndryl commissioned Coleman Parkes Research to survey 500 enterprises that rely on mainframes, in order to gather their insights into how they view mainframe transformation and application modernization. In addition to this online survey, Coleman held a number of qualitative surveys. The study was executed in Q1 FY 2026.

The 500 leaders we surveyed included senior IT decision-makers and line-of-business leaders working in enterprise and mid-market organizations with an average global revenue of USD $3.6 billion. They shared insights into their strategic approach to mainframe modernization projects.

The respondents work for organizations based in North America (26%), Europe (25%), Latin America (25%) and the Asia-Pacific region (24%). They work across 12 industries – including high-tech, banking & financial services, manufacturing, healthcare, retail, insurance, telco & media, oil & gas, automotive, energy & utilities, travel and transportation, and government. 

Kyndryl, a leading provider of mission-critical enterprise technology services, today launched the Kyndryl Agentic AI Framework, a new approach to deploying agentic AI to augment human teams. The enterprise-grade Framework orchestrates and dispatches a portfolio of specialized, self-directed, self-learning AI agents that dynamically respond to shifting conditions and keep humans in the loop for oversight. 

The Kyndryl Agentic AI Framework enables enterprises to adopt, deploy and scale agentic AI-powered solutions — whether on-premises, in the cloud or in a hybrid IT setting — to transform and improve their business operations. In deploying the Framework, Kyndryl leverages its expertise from thousands of infrastructure deployments and its experience with generating over 12 million AI-driven insights monthly via Kyndryl Bridge. The Framework combines advanced algorithms, self-learning, optimization and secure-by-design AI agents that translate complex data into clear, understandable insights.

Kyndryl’s new Agentic AI Framework deploys intelligent agents that act, learn and collaborate with humans to drive positive outcomes across complex workflows.

Customers across industries are already working with Kyndryl to explore and understand how they can leverage the Agentic Framework’s sophisticated capabilities, including:

• A national government evaluating the Kyndryl Agentic AI Framework for a large-scale deployment across their complex IT estate. The government aims to enhance citizen experiences, improve public service, ensure compliance and reduce regulatory risks by leveraging the Framework and Kyndryl’s expertise in transparent and responsible AI. This will empower government stakeholders to align policies with best practices and operate efficiently for the benefit of their constituents. The capability will enable government employees to view real-time, up-to-date insights on metrics such as traffic congestion, hospital bed availability and school attendance.
• As part of an ongoing modernization program, a leading financial institution is working with Kyndryl Consult to assess how it can apply Kyndryl’s Agentic AI Framework to introduce AI agents for automating compliance, optimizing IT and accelerating service delivery. By leveraging this solution, the institution aims to enhance agility, strengthen cyber resilience, meet regulatory standards, and drive long-term innovation and operational efficiency.

This new Framework comes at a critical moment for enterprise leaders who are struggling to see benefits from AI use cases. In fact, according to Kyndryl’s recently published 2025 People Readiness Report, only 4 in 10 leaders report using AI-powered insights to enhance decision-making or unlock business growth. In addition, only one-fifth of business leaders say the primary use case of AI in their organization is to develop new products and services for customers.

The Kyndryl Agentic AI Framework can help organizations confidently deploy AI with trust and security in mind. The Framework was built with industry-standard encryption protocols, privacy-by-design principles and zero-trust security — fostering trust in AI-driven processes and assurances that agent actions are traceable, interpretable and continuously improved with human oversight. It can also be tailored to meet enterprises’ needs and adapt to industries through self-directed learning, enabling organizations to apply the Framework to a wide range of use cases and projects with speed and confidence.

Kyndryl Consult experts will work side-by-side with customers to assess, design, engineer and plan deployments of the Framework that are tailored to individual customer business requirements.

Learn more information about Kyndryl’s Agentic AI Framework.

A new global study released today by Kyndryl found that only a small number of organizations have taken steps to align their workforce strategies with the growth of AI technology. Those that have done so have positioned themselves ahead in the race to deliver positive return on investments in the technology.

Based on a survey of more than 1,000 senior business and technology executives across 25 industries and eight geographies, Kyndryl’s first People Readiness Report reveals a striking gap between AI investment and workforce preparedness:

• 95% of businesses have invested in AI
• 71% of leaders say their workforces are not yet ready to successfully leverage the technology
• 51% believe their organizations lack the skilled talent needed to manage AI
• 45% of CEOs think most employees are resistant or even openly hostile to AI

Workforce readiness varies by industry. Businesses in Banking, Financial Services and Insurance report the highest levels of preparedness, while those in Healthcare report trailing behind.

Despite widespread attempts at implementation, most organizations are not currently benefiting from game-changing use cases that will drive new products and services for their customers. Generative AI tools are the most popular use case reported by those surveyed, yet only 4 in 10 leaders report using AI-powered insights to enhance decision-making or unlock growth for their business. Just one-fifth of leaders say the primary use case of AI at their organization is to develop new products and services for customers.

Yet this research also reveals that a small subset of AI Pacesetters has leveraged AI for business growth while addressing workforce readiness. They are making strategic workforce decisions and seeing benefits across their employee population. Pacesetters are uniquely addressing 3 key barriers that are inhibiting AI adoption, and they are seeing benefits from their actions across:

1. Organizational change management: AI Pacesetters are three times more likely than others to report a fully implemented change management strategy for AI in the workplace.
2. Lack of employee trust in AI: AI Pacesetters are 29% less likely to cite fears around AI affecting employee engagement.
3. Skill gaps: AI Pacesetters are 67% more likely to agree that their organization has the tools and processes to accurately inventory the skills employees currently have. Four in 10 report no skills challenges at all.

Compared to CIOs and CTOs, CEOs are far more likely to say their organization is still in its early stages of AI, and two and a half times more likely to say their infrastructure is inadequate to support it. This difference also extends to how they choose to solve AI-related workforce challenges and the individual skills they believe their organization needs to be successful. CEOs are far more likely to turn to outside talent rather than upskilling their own employees.

To read the full report, visit Kyndryl’s People Readiness Report.