New research highlights disconnect over AI confidence between staff employers
Across ANZ, AI has moved from aspiration to active investment. Organisations are building strategies, deploying tools and reporting confidence in their readiness. The question of whether workforces are genuinely prepared to deliver on that ambition is proving harder to answer than most expect.
Now, fresh research across both markets puts hard numbers to that question. While ANZ leadership teams believe their organisations are ready for AI, their employees, by and large, do not. The inherent risk in this simple realisation is considerable.
The findings, surfaced in a new report by workforce-readiness solutions provider Cornerstone OnDemand in partnership with Great Place To Work Australia and New Zealand, highlight a significant and measurable gap between leadership confidence and employee experience across both markets, one that concentrates most sharply in the areas organisations can least afford: AI adoption, leadership capability and workforce trust.
The report, The Hidden Number: The Economic Value of Culture and Capability, draws on surveys of 452 HR leaders and 780 employees across organisations with 500 or more staff, assessing workforce capability across six areas: skills visibility, learning, career mobility, culture and trust, leadership, and AI and workforce planning. Across all six, AI readiness emerges as the most critical blind spot.
Where the AI confidence gap is widest
Both Australia and New Zealand record some of the largest HR-employee gaps in AI readiness, indicating a major risk area for organisational transformation. While HR leaders express high confidence in their organisation’s ability to integrate AI into workforce planning, employees feel significantly less equipped for automation, role change and emerging technologies.
96% of HR leaders are confident in AI readiness, but less than half of employees agree.
Less than half of employees feel equipped and supported to adapt to AI and automation, including 45% in Australia and 47% in New Zealand. This highlights a growing gap between technological change and workforce preparedness.
The confidence gap is largest in the workforce cohorts and organisational layers carrying the greatest execution responsibility. Middle managers and Gen X employees, the people most responsible for translating AI strategy into daily practice, report the lowest scores across all six capability areas, including AI readiness.
Gen X emerges as the most critical and most at-risk cohort. Despite occupying the majority of management roles, they report the lowest scores across all six capability areas, including leadership, mobility, and AI readiness. This creates a structural risk: the group responsible for executing strategy is also the least supported by current capability systems.
Among Gen X employees in Australia, nearly one in five, 19%, do not believe their organisation is helping them build the skills needed for the future, compared with 9% of Gen Z and Millennials.
One likely explanation lies in the role Gen X plays within organisations. As the primary cohort occupying middle and senior management roles, they are responsible for translating strategy into execution, managing teams, and navigating organisational change.
As a result, they are often the most exposed to capability gaps, particularly in areas such as leadership, workforce planning, and internal mobility. At the same time, capability-building initiatives may be disproportionately focused on early-career talent, leaving more experienced cohorts comparatively underserved.
It should be noted that closing this gap is not primarily a technology challenge, it is also a cultural challenge.
Great Place To Work research across Australia’s 100 Best Workplaces reveals why. These organisations score 93% on innovation versus 57% at typical workplaces, a 36-point premium. On employee extra effort, the discretionary energy required to experiment with new tools and approaches, 94% versus 56%. On cooperation, the cross-functional collaboration that AI initiatives depend on, 92% versus 50%.
Organisations where employees feel psychologically safe, involved in decisions, and trusted to exercise judgement are the same organisations where transformation succeeds.
AI transformation does not stall because of models or infrastructure. It stalls because employees do not trust what the transformation means for their future, and because the managers responsible for leading that transformation feel no better supported than the people they manage.
The pattern behind the numbers and what this means for leaders
A persistent gap between leadership perception and employee experience runs across all capability areas. HR leaders report significantly higher confidence than employees, suggesting that capability is often designed centrally but experienced unevenly. That gap between intent and reality is where performance risk sits.
The most significant disconnects are found in AI and Workforce Planning, Leadership and Change Capability, and Culture, Engagement and Trust, the very areas critical to executing transformation, sustaining productivity and retaining talent.
Capability appears strongest in areas such as learning activation and skills visibility. However, it weakens significantly in leadership and change capability, culture and trust, and AI and workforce planning. This suggests that organisations are more effective at building capability frameworks than delivering consistent employee experience.
Closing this gap is essential to ensuring that AI initiatives translate into genuine workforce readiness and do not stall due to uncertainty, low confidence or insufficient support at ground level.
Organisations that take a more targeted approach to capability building are better positioned to allocate investment where it drives the greatest return, address the most critical gaps, and accelerate impact across workforce outcomes. Gaps across mid-career talent and leadership layers represent high-leverage opportunities for capability investment.
The full findings of the report, including capability scores across all six areas, generational breakdowns, and practical guidance on closing the AI confidence gap at the workforce levels where execution happens, are available in The Hidden Number: The Economic Value of Culture and Capability.
Organisations can also benchmark their own capability score and estimate their economic opportunity using the Culture and Capability Index Calculator.
About Cornerstone
Cornerstone believes in AI that works in the service of people, amplifying their judgment to drive high-performing, future-ready organisations forward. Cornerstone Workforce AI, the intelligence platform for workforce readiness, brings together workforce and labour market data into a proprietary Cornerstone People Graph, translating signals into intelligence, targeting learning where it matters, developing critical skills, and surfacing hidden talent. Delivered as an open, enterprise platform across whatever application your people work in every day, Cornerstone Workforce AI is built for scale, security, and trust, with certified AI guardrails. As an industry leader, Cornerstone is helping approximately 7,000 organisations, 140M+ users, across 186 countries build continuous workforce readiness.Â
