AI will touch all IT work by 2030, according to Gartner, which says the IT estate of 2030 will be powered by humans, amplified by AI, and orchestrated by the CIO.
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 Gartner survey of over 700 CIOs conducted in July 2025.
This means that organisations must balance AI readiness and human readiness to sustain value from AI. But few organisations are doing this.
“Gartner has been guiding CIOs and IT executives on their AI journeys for many years,” says Gabriela Vogel, VP analyst at Gartner. “In 2023, we showed them how to shape their AI ambition. Last year at IT Symposium/Xpo, 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.”
Rob O’Donohue, VP analyst at Gartner, adds: “While not all AI is ready to deliver value, humans are even less ready to capture value. 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.”
Transform the workforce to capture and sustain AI value
Gartner’s position is that AI’s impact on global jobs will be neutral through 2026. Gartner predicts that by 2028, AI will create more jobs than it destroys.
“AI is not about job loss,” says Vogel. “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.”
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 summarisation, information retrieval, and translation less important as AI is ready to automate or augment these tasks,” says O’Donohue. “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 say 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.
Find AI value through AI readiness
AI readiness should be evaluated in terms of costs, technical capabilities, and vendors:
- Costs: In EMEA, 73% 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 and code generation, and summarisation are ready. Other capabilities such as AI accuracy and AI agents are not. When considering AI accuracy and AI agents, organisations should pivot from conversational agents to decision-making agents and, most importantly, they should invest in AI agents that are experts.
- 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 fully 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 organizations are for every initiative they pursue. This system will help guide organizations on the path to AI value by gauging whether technology and human talent are ready to achieve their AI.
The “You Are Here” Gartner Positioning System (Example Position)
“Following the Gartner Positioning System, organisations can seek to find, capture, and sustain AI value,” says Vogel. “If they are successful, they can transcend their limitations. AI creates shockwaves which might turn a hospital into just a treatment centre and might build an autonomous workforce for an autonomous business.
“But the real payoff comes when AI solutions are focused on improving the core competencies of an organisation or solving impossible problems.”