By 2030, CIOs expect that 0% of IT work will be done by humans without AI, 75% will be done by humans augmented with AI, and 25% will be done by AI alone, according to a July 2025 survey of over 700 CIOs by Gartner.
This means that organisations need to focus on a combination of AI readiness and human readiness to ensure the right balance to achieve value from AI.
“Gartner has been guiding CIOs and IT executives on their AI journeys for many years. In 2023, we showed them how to shape their AI ambition. Last year we explained how to pace themselves in the AI outcomes race. This year, we’re mapping out the right path for them to take so they can go all-in on AI value,” says Daryl Plummer, vice-president, distinguished analyst, Gartner Fellow and chief of AI research for the Gartner High Tech Leaders and Providers practice.
“While not all AI is ready to deliver value, humans are even less ready to capture value,” adds Alicia Mullery, vice-president analyst at Gartner. “AI readiness means AI can help you find value and effectively meet the needs of specific use cases. Human readiness is about whether you have the right workforce and organization to capture and sustain AI value.”
Gartner’s position is that AI’s impact on global jobs will be neutral through 2026. By 2036, AI solutions introduced to augment or autonomously deliver tasks, activities or jobs will result in more than 500-million net new human jobs to support new AI initiatives.
“AI is not about job loss. It’s about workforce transformation. CIOs should start transforming their workforces by restraining new hiring (especially for roles involving low-complexity tasks) and by repositioning talent to new business areas that generate revenue,” says Plummer.
Restraining hiring will help to enhance productivity and optimise costs, but to capture new value, more needs to be done. The workforce needs to be able to work with AI in radically new ways. The skills they need are going to change.
“AI will make some skills, such as summarization, information retrieval and translation, less important, as AI is ready to automate or augment these tasks,” says Mullery. “But AI also creates a need for entirely new skills. These AI skills are fundamentally different from most skills. Where skills were traditionally about doing tasks better, AI skills are about making you better — a better motivator, a better thinker and a better communicator.”
Gartner analysts says that organisations’ skills development plans should go beyond training people in new skills. If people rely too much on AI and stop using their core skills, skills atrophy can happen. Workers should be tested periodically to make sure they are retaining critical skills for important roles.
Gartner believes that AI readiness should be evaluated in terms of costs, technical capabilities, and vendors:
Costs
In a May 2025 Gartner survey of 506 CIOs and other technology leaders, 72% of CIOs reported that their organisations are breaking even or are losing money on their AI investments.
For every AI tool organisations buy, they should anticipate 10 hidden costs plus the transition costs of training and change management.
Organisations should conduct an analysis and decide which costs they’ll fund.
Technical capabilities
Some AI capabilities, such as search, content generation and summarisation, are ready. Other capabilities, such as AI accuracy and AI agents, are not.
If organisations don’t get the technical capabilities right, value returns will be fragile and prone to failure. For example, when considering AI accuracy and AI agents, organisations should focus on building their own AI accuracy processes and piloting autonomous, multiagent AI systems that can help reinvent processes and generate revenue.
Vendors
Determining the right vendor for an organisation’s AI needs is dependent on the type of AI implementation:
- If an organisation is planning a massive rollout of AI, hyperscalers have the AI infrastructure scale to support a wide range of outcomes.
- For industry-specific use cases, start-ups can offer domain-specific AI agents, in-depth knowledge and capabilities that can deliver immediate benefits.
- For rapid innovation and leading-edge AI capabilities, AI research and development companies are innovation-ready but don’t quite have the raw scale to be enterprise-ready.
- Every AI decision made is a sovereignty decision, so don’t ignore AI sovereignty.
Gartner has identified four perspectives to assess how ready organisations are for every initiative they pursue. This system will help guide organisations on the path to AI value by gauging whether technology and human talent are ready to achieve their AI ambitions.
The ‘You Are Here’ Gartner Positioning System (Example Position)
Source: Gartner (October 2025)
“Following the Gartner Positioning System, organisations can seek to find, capture, and sustain AI value. If they are successful, they can transcend their limitations,” says Plummer.
“AI creates shockwaves which might make college education no longer necessary, which might turn a hospital into just a treatment centre, or which might make it easier to predict the future.
“But the real payoff comes when AI solutions are focused on improving the core competencies of an organisation or solving impossible problems.”