A lot of companies right now are moving fast on artificial intelligence, rushing to pick tools, automate tasks, and get a return on investment as quickly as possible. The urgency is real, but something important is getting lost in the scramble.
The question most organisations are asking is which AI to buy. The question they should be asking is whether their people are actually ready to work alongside it. Those are two very different conversations, and conflating them is where things start to go wrong.
Purchasing a tool is not a transformation strategy. Deployment without genuine workforce preparation tends to produce frustration, low adoption rates, and teams that quietly revert to old habits because nobody properly brought them along for the change.
The organisations getting this right are the ones treating readiness as the real project, not the afterthought. That means investing in people before, or at least alongside, the technology itself.
The gap between AI adoption and workforce readiness is not a technical problem. It is a leadership one, and the companies willing to sit with that discomfort long enough to address it are the ones worth watching.
Originally published by BusinessDay.