New Tools, New Skills, No End in Sight: The Challenge of AI Adoption
Keeping up with AI is a Sisyphean task—it is never truly done, and if not managed correctly, it can roll over your business.
The second edition of our annual Enterprise AI Index study, created in collaboration with ServiceNow, illustrates this challenge. This measure of AI maturity—the degree to which a company is realizing value from its AI initiatives—showed declining scores from the previous year as even proficient organizations struggled to keep up with the flood of innovation.
Early successes with technologies such as generative AI proved no guarantee of future performance as newer tools like agentic AI entered the conversation. And the changes will continue.
Benchmarking the challenge
Our study, which included a survey of nearly 4,500 business and IT executives in major economies around the world, benchmarked AI adoption scores across five areas: spending, governance, leadership, workflow integration, and talent. Working with our econometric team, we found that the rapid discovery of new use cases for AI-driven technologies distorts the transformation topography—because right when companies begin to grasp one use case, a new one pops up.
Even the best performing cohort in our survey sample struggles with the same issues. Their relative success versus their peers rests in part on a more clearly articulated vision for AI strategy and adoption, and a sharper focus on talent, including hiring and upskilling the right people. These leaders are also more likely than other respondents to host AI learning events and to identify AI champions to lead change from within their organization.
Impact AI Series: Enterprise AI Maturity Index 2025
Read the reportThe Human Factor: The Core of AI Readiness
As we see so often in our technology research, the human factor plays an outsized role in determining the successful adoption of the latest wave of innovation. At a moment when employees around the world are witnessing changes to the landscapes of their work, companies are scrambling to adapt. Over half of survey respondents say they provide training to upskill employees, yet only 29% believe they have the right mix of talent to execute on their AI strategy.
That talent story was especially interesting to me because it is directly relevant to my experience as a young professional and the ever-shifting environment facing workers just starting their careers. As Oxford Economics continues to add AI capabilities both for internal use and client-facing services, I can see the goal posts moving.
Your own employees and colleagues are feeling the same way, and our research highlights these challenges at an enterprise level. But the data also tells a more promising story: Higher scores on our AI adoption index can be connected with stronger business performance—which is the point of rolling that rock up the hill in the first place.
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