AI-Era Board Mandates Meet a Reality Divide: New Cornerstone Research Shows Workforce Readiness is a Business Imperative CHROs and CIOs Must Own Together

By Business Wire On Jul 29, 2026

With the pace of change accelerating, the new report reveals organizations act faster and make better decisions when CIOs and CHROs co-own workforce readiness — yet most aren’t making decisions jointly

As AI reshapes how work gets done, workforce readiness has emerged as a defining business capability that the most prepared organizations are no longer leaving for HR alone. New research released by Cornerstone OnDemand Inc., a global leader in workforce readiness solutions, finds that organizations treating workforce readiness as a shared enterprise priority — co-owned by the CHRO and CIO — act on workforce changes 13% faster and are 67% more likely to feel equipped to make decisions at the speed AI-driven change demands.

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With 65% of leaders reporting a high level of change, the costs of the workforce-readiness disconnect between HR and IT are stark: skills gaps going unaddressed for too long (50%), delayed decisions on hiring (44%), and missed productivity targets (41%).

Yet a model of shared ownership remains rare, as only 35% of HR and IT decision-makers report making AI decisions jointly, and fewer than half (48%) say they work toward shared goals. The findings come from The Board’s New Mandate to CIOs and CHROs, a study conducted by Cornerstone in partnership with Vanson Bourne based on a survey of 2,000 IT leaders, HR leaders and employees across the U.S., Europe and Australia.

With 65% of leaders reporting a high level of change in the last 12 months — and 69% expecting that pace to continue — the costs of the workforce-readiness disconnect between HR and IT are stark: skills gaps going unaddressed for too long (50%); delayed decisions on hiring, redeployment and restructuring (44%); and missed productivity targets (41%).

The nature of change is also shifting the capability required to respond to it. Leaders identify the introduction of AI tools or AI-driven ways of working (45%), new digital tools beyond AI (44%), new skills required to perform jobs (41%), and increased productivity expectations (35%) as the greatest areas of change facing their organizations. Those shifts demand more than traditional HR planning, where organizations that use AI for workforce planning are more than twice as likely (63% vs. 30%) to say they have the processes, data and tools needed to make workforce decisions quickly.

“The organizations making progress bring workforce and technology decisions together from the start, rather than trying to sort out alignment after decisions have already been made,” said Cornerstone’s Chief AI Officer, Guna Jayaraman. “CIOs and CHROs need a shared view of current skills, changing roles and future needs so they can make decisions faster and with more confidence. For most organizations, workforce information is spread across systems that don’t talk well to each other, if at all. AI can help connect those signals, but only if it gives leaders one clear view of their workforce, shared priorities, and the ability to act on what they see.”

For most organizations, the structural foundation for enterprise-wide readiness is not yet in place. Even as 94% of IT and HR leaders say a more adaptive, shared approach to workforce planning is now essential, 54% identify a lack of IT-HR alignment as one of their top challenges to acting on workforce data. IT and HR decision-makers cite the root causes as a lack of joint planning between AI strategy and workforce development (40%), slow upskilling and reskilling processes (38%), limited visibility into future skills needs (38%), difficulty predicting future roles or capabilities (37%), and fragmented workforce data (37%).

Those gaps are registering directly in employee experience:

65% of employees say their day-to-day responsibilities have changed meaningfully in the last year, and 89% agree that more support from their organization would help them keep up with changes to their role.

Only 17% say they feel completely prepared for how their role will evolve over the next 12-24 months.
60% describe their organization’s approach to skills development as reactive, with support arriving during or after change.

Only 22% strongly agree they receive the support they need for continued development.
58% say they are learning new skills to support their current role, but only 39% say they are receiving organizational support to do so.
But where IT and HR operate from shared data and close coordination, leaders are nearly three times more likely to say employees are better prepared for change than 12 months ago.

“CHROs are being asked to keep talent moving at the pace of technology, and that’s becoming harder to do with fragmented data and disconnected planning,” said Cornerstone’s Chief People Officer, Carina Cortez. “This is now a board-level mandate because workforce readiness is measured by how well organizations adapt as work changes and how quickly employees can succeed in new realities. Employees will embrace AI when they understand how it will improve their work and when they have the support to adapt. That requires HR and IT to act as one team with the right data to make it possible.”

For organizations navigating continuous change, Cornerstone Workforce AI™ brings together workforce and labor market data into a single, 360-degree view to identify capability gaps, surface internal talent, target learning where it matters most and connect insight to action across the business.

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