Why AI Readiness Is Falling While Spending Rises
23 Jul 2026
Last year 29 percent of workforces were ready for AI. This year it is 23.
Investment is going up. Readiness is going down. Kyndryl asked 1,100 senior leaders across eight countries and found the same pattern everywhere. (Kyndryl 2026 People Readiness Report.)
The money goes up. The people fall behind.
Here is the part most reports skip.
Readiness is not something your company hands you. It is not the next tool, the next licence, the next rollout.
It is a choice you make before anyone asks you to.
Being ready does not mean knowing every tool. It means being willing to change how you work before you are forced to. That has never been a technology problem. It is a mindset one. It always has been.
Kyndryl calls the organisations pulling ahead Pacesetters. Nine percent of the total. They redesign roles around AI and invest seriously in their people. They are 1.5 times more likely to see revenue growth from AI.
The same logic applies to you. Not the org chart. You.
You can wait for the training that may never come. Or you can start now, while it still counts as a head start.
Which side of that gap are you on?
Readiness is a mindset choice, and it starts before the org chart moves
The Kyndryl numbers back up something I see constantly in my own work. The organisations furthest ahead with AI are not the ones with the biggest budget. They are the ones where individual people decided to get ready before their company built a formal programme around it.
This is the core of how I frame AI upskilling with the leaders and teams I work with.
→ Readiness is not a training you attend once.
→ It is not a certificate.
→ It is a series of small decisions to change how you work, made before anyone requires it of you.
The nine percent Kyndryl calls Pacesetters got there because enough individuals inside those companies made that choice early, and leadership backed them.
I talk about this using a simple frame I use in my keynotes: what will AI do matters far less than what will you do. The gap between the 23 percent and the Pacesetters is not a skills gap. It is a decision gap. I go deeper into what that decision actually looks like for senior leaders in what senior leaders actually need from AI in 2026.
If you want a structured way to work through your own readiness rather than wait for a company rollout, I have a free AI Coach Tünde Light, a set of AI powered self-coaching prompts that help you take back agency over decisions like this one. Leave your email here and I will send it over: https://www.thechangerepublic.com/free-resources