AI-Ready, or Just AI-Busy? What IDC's Research Reveals About Workforce Readiness

Bold claim: According to IDC, only 30% of organizations worldwide consider themselves ready for AI adoption and for most, the top barrier isn't budget or infrastructure. It's skills.

The cost of guessing is no longer abstract. IDC estimates skills shortages could drain up to $5.5 trillion from the global economy by 2026 through delayed projects, quality issues, and missed revenue. Yet most leaders still run on self-reported data and hope. You cannot close a gap you cannot see.

Skills intelligence platforms exist to make that gap visible: replacing assumption with evidence, and giving leaders verified, defensible proof of workforce capability across the talent lifecycle. In this session we'll get specific about what that proof looks like and how to tell it apart from the dashboards that only repackage guesses.

Join Gina Smith, PhD, Research Director, IT Skills for Digital Business at IDC, and Taylor Sullivan, PhD, Head of Product at Workera, for a candid fireside chat on what IDC's latest research shows and what it takes to build a workforce that can actually deliver.

You'll leave knowing:

• Why skills gaps are the #1 barrier to AI execution — and what verified skills data reveals that traditional signals miss
• What "human skills for the AI era" really means in practice, and why they're harder to assess than technical skills but just as critical
• How to evaluate the skills tech stack: where broad workforce planning tools fall short and where verified intelligence begins