Everybody wants to talk about which AI model to buy. Almost nobody's talking about what happens after it's installed and the people around it don't know what to do with it.
Kyndryl's second annual People Readiness Report puts numbers on that gap. It surveyed 1,100 senior business and technology leaders across eight countries, and it was released in late June. The headline: 57% of enterprises now have AI embedded in core processes or deployed broadly. Kyndryl compares that to the 35% who reported full integration in its separate 2025 Readiness Report. Across all respondents, only 32% have hit at least one of their top two AI goals. Just 11% have hit both.
Deployment is up. Outcomes are lagging well behind it. The report's emphasis is workforce readiness, not technology. That's right. But the problem goes deeper.
Kyndryl's own CIO frames it the same way. As Kim Basile put it in the company's June 25 release: "This is a critical moment for global enterprises as they race to adopt AI, redesign workflows and pursue innovation, yet they're finding that their greatest assets – their people – need more attention."
The workforce numbers are the story
According to Kyndryl's June 25 release and MarketScale's summary:
- 23% of leaders say their workforce is fully prepared for AI. That is down from 29% in 2025. Readiness fell while deployment rose, at least on Kyndryl's own year-over-year comparison.
- 33% have fully implemented employee training programs for working with AI.
- 61% have redesigned roles for AI, but only 24% are creating dedicated AI management roles.
- 52% say finding employees with the right AI skills has become more challenging.
- 81% expect agentic AI to be making decisions with material business impact within a year, yet only 25% completely trust AI without human oversight.
Read those together. Companies are redesigning jobs at nearly twice the rate they're fully training people for them (61% vs. 33%), expecting autonomous agents within twelve months, and struggling to find people with the right AI skills to supervise them. That's a lot to ask of a thin layer of talent that's already spoken for.
The report also identifies a small group of "pacesetters," about 9% of organizations. They are 1.5x more likely to report AI-related revenue growth and twice as likely to have implemented all the governance dimensions Kyndryl measured. The winners aren't buying better software. They're building the human and governance scaffolding around it.
Mark Paulek, Kyndryl's chief human resources officer, put the difference this way in the same release: "The leaders pulling ahead are aligning skills, roles and decision-making with how work is actually changing."
What I would do about it
Kyndryl sells services into this problem (it's an IT services company, after all), so take the framing with some salt. But the numbers hang together, and they point to three moves:
- Budget for the people line, not just the license line. If your AI plan has a seven-figure platform cost and a training budget that fits on a napkin, you have already told me which 89% you're in.
- Hire the supervisors first. Someone has to own AI output review, governance, and escalation. Only 24% of companies in Kyndryl's survey are creating new roles focused on AI management, which is exactly why those people are hard to find. They are not junior hires, and they won't show up because you posted a generic "AI engineer" req.
- Use contract talent to move now. With 52% of leaders saying AI-skilled hires are getting harder to find, a permanent search can take months you don't have. Experienced contract engineers and project leads can stand up governance, train teams, and prove the workflow while you hire for the long term.
Everybody's still arguing about which model to buy. The expensive mistake in 2026 isn't picking the wrong one. It's dropping a good one into an organization that isn't ready to use it. Then you wonder why the business case never shows up.
If your AI rollout is live and the results aren't, don't call the vendor. Check the org chart.
Phil Vanderslice is the founder of VC5 Consulting, a technical staffing and consulting firm.
Sources: Kyndryl: People Readiness Report 2026 · Kyndryl press release, June 25, 2026 · MarketScale: Kyndryl's 2026 People Readiness Report · MarketScale: AI is deployed in 57% of enterprises, but only 11% have hit their top two goals