AI Agent & Copilot Podcast: Kyndryl AI Readiness Report Finds People, Orgs Have a Steep Hill to Climb

Welcome to the AI Agent & Copilot Podcast, analyzing the latest AI Copilot and agent developments from Microsoft and its partners, delving into customer use cases, and exploring how AI plus the Cloud helps customers reimagine their business. In this episode, Tom Smith discusses research from Kyndryl on the AI readiness of companies and people.

Highlights

01:01 — New “People Readiness 2025” research from Kyndryl is built around responses from 1,100 C-suite business leaders. Several of the findings are not especially encouraging when it comes to enterprise AI readiness — but I think a dose of reality is helpful. Here’s the reality:

71% of leaders say their workforce is not ready to successfully leverage AI in the workplace.
In healthcare — 81% say they’re not completely ready for AI, vs. a paltry 19% who say they are.
In telecom — often viewed as a “tech industry” sector — 78% say they’re not completely ready.

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02:24 — Amid these dim statistics, are any industries performing well? My read is, not really. The highest performer statistically is banking and finance, where only 64% say they’re not completely ready.

More findings:

45% of CEOs say most employees are resistant — if not openly hostile — to AI.
60% of organizations are just starting their journeys or still in the integration process with AI, while 5% responded that their organization is not currently utilizing AI.

04:08 — Another troubling finding: when viewed by industry, insurance is performing the highest on the metric of percent of respondents’ whose primary AI use case involves products or services for customers — insurance is at 35% of companies in this category. Compare that with a cross-industry percent of just 21% and healthcare at a mere 22%.

05:14 — These figures in some ways align with others I recently shared from ServiceNow, which found AI maturity within companies actually declined year over year. Big takeaway: there’ s a ton of work to do before these companies can catch up to the remarkable pace of AI tech advances that are playing out.