AI strategies are often built around technology: which tools to buy, where to deploy them and how quickly they can scale. What determines whether those strategies succeed is often less technical. West Monroe’s recent report, Building the AI-Native Enterprise, found that while 91% of leaders say their organizations are aligned on AI strategy, only 57% are confident in leadership’s ability to execute it.
However, that recognition has yet to translate into investment. According to the report, more than two-thirds of business leaders say AI budgets are outpacing overall company spending, yet only 13% plan on prioritizing workforce skills and change management over the next 12 months. Closing the readiness gap requires organizations to treat workforce readiness as part of the AI strategy from the start. That means getting clear on the problem AI is meant to solve, identifying how the work needs to change, translating those changes into a clear transformation plan, and defining expectations for the role employees need to play in making it all happen.
Start with the Problem, Not the Tool
Companies may underinvest in workforce skills because they have not defined what they expect AI to accomplish. At a high level, AI can create value at three levels:
- Personal productivity: An employee uses a tool like Copilot to complete part of their job more efficiently.
- Operational efficiency: A team uses an agent to accelerate a process that were previously handled manually.
- Workflow transformation: An organization redesigns an entire way of working from end to end.
These levels often get conflated. A company rolls out a productivity tool and then judges it against expectations for broader workflow transformation. When the projected return doesn’t show up, the immediate conclusion may be that the technology failed. In many cases, the investment and the expected outcome never matched in the first place.
A lack of clarity can also create issues when moving from strategy to execution. Leaders may agree that AI will transform the business but lack an understanding of what that transformation should look like.
For example, a business unit may be told to use AI to drive 25% efficiency by year-end, without explanation on how 25% will be measured. The next layer of leadership is then left to interpret the direction and decide how to deliver against it without consistency or alignment on the value levers to track the efficiency gains. Strong execution begins with clarifying the problem, the value being pursued and how success will be measured.
Build Skills for Behavior Change
Once organizations understand how AI will change the work, they can determine how their talent strategy must evolve. This means identifying the skills employees will need, including critical thinking, prompting, validating outputs, fact-checking, and decision-making. These skills stretch beyond traditional ‘point and click’ training on steps in a process – but lend more to practicing mindset shift, literacy, and reasoning. That is why it is more useful to think in terms of skill identification and upskilling than training alone. New employees may be hired and need to be brought up to speed on more basic AI workflows, while experienced employees may need more concentrated support.
HR leaders can bring structure to this by starting with an AI literacy assessment by organizational level and business area. A simple approach is to:
- Define the AI literacy and skills the business strategy will require.
- Assess current capabilities across levels and functions.
- Create a heat map showing where stronger AI literacy is most important to adoption and business value.
That heat map gives leaders a way to prioritize limited resources around actual gaps instead of defaulting to a one-size-fits-all approach.
Organizations that sustain AI momentum recognize that adoption depends on giving employees the clarity, skills, and support to succeed. Not everyone needs to become an AI expert, and a thoughtful strategy accounts for different skill levels, roles, and ways of working. Prioritizing workforce readiness alongside new tools can build confidence, reduce resistance, and make it easier for employees to adapt as their work evolves.
Katie Fitzgerald is a Managing Director at West Monroe, leading the change discipline with the firm’s Organization, People & Change practice. She guides organizations to prepare their workforces for transformation by connecting business strategy, operating change and skill development.