AI readiness gap widens across Asia-Pacific, report finds

Cornerstone has published research on AI readiness across Australia, New Zealand and the wider Asia-Pacific region, finding a wide gap between how prepared HR leaders and employees believe their organisations are for AI.

The report, The Hidden Number: The Economic Value of Culture and Capability, surveyed 1,297 HR leaders and 2,435 employees across Australia, New Zealand, India, Indonesia, Singapore, Japan, South Korea and the Philippines.

Its central finding was that HR leaders consistently rated workforce capability more highly than employees did in every market covered. The gap persisted across both high-growth and mature economies, raising questions about whether management teams are basing decisions on an overly optimistic view of workforce readiness.

AI and workforce planning emerged as the biggest blind spot across Asia-Pacific and Japan. Employees reported much lower confidence in their preparedness for automation and role change than HR leaders assumed.

Japan recorded the lowest capability maturity score in the region and the weakest employee confidence in AI readiness. In Australia and New Zealand, 96% of HR leaders said they were confident in their organisation's AI readiness, while fewer than half of employees said the same.

The study adds to a growing body of evidence that employers may be moving ahead with AI adoption faster than they are preparing staff for the changes that follow. Cornerstone cited separate research in the US and UK showing that 46% of employees were using AI tools at work without formal training from their employer, while 65% were building AI skills independently outside work.

That pattern suggests organisations are relying on workers to close skills gaps themselves as AI tools spread through everyday tasks. It also points to a broader management challenge around training, workforce planning and change management as companies weigh investment, restructures and hiring decisions.

Regional gap

The survey was built around Cornerstone's Culture and Capability Index, a tool designed to measure workforce conditions linked to organisational performance. The index assesses six pillars and is intended to help employers benchmark their standing and identify gaps.

While the detailed pillar scores were not included in the announcement, the emphasis on culture, capability and AI preparedness reflects a wider shift in boardroom priorities. Many companies have focused heavily on the technical deployment of AI, but the report argues that the human side of adoption remains harder to measure and easier to overlook.

Brenton Smith, Vice President, Asia-Pacific & Japan at Cornerstone, said the cost of that blind spot often sits in parts of the business not usually treated as a single workforce issue.

"The most important drivers of performance in modern organisations have historically been invisible. They sit across attrition, lost productivity, delayed hiring, contractor reliance and failed transformation outcomes, but are rarely measured as one workforce lever," Smith said.

The results also show a notable disconnect inside organisations over the practical meaning of AI readiness. For HR leaders, confidence may reflect policy, investment plans or access to technology. For employees, readiness is more likely to mean whether they understand new tools, trust their use and believe they can adapt to changing roles.

That distinction matters because businesses increasingly expect AI to alter workflows, job design and skills requirements across departments. If leadership teams overestimate how ready staff are for those changes, they risk underinvesting in training or misjudging how quickly new systems can be adopted.

Workforce focus

Cornerstone has launched Cornerstone Workforce AI alongside the report, describing it as an intelligence platform for workforce readiness that draws on its People Graph and Skills Engine.

According to the company, those systems use workforce data built over two decades across 45 million users, labour market information, a taxonomy of more than 55,000 skills, more than 1 billion workforce profiles and data from systems of record to generate insights for workforce decisions.

Cornerstone operates in a large market for human resources technology and learning systems, where suppliers are increasingly repositioning around AI-led planning, internal mobility and skills intelligence. The latest research appears aimed at reinforcing the argument that the value of such systems depends not only on automation itself, but on whether organisations have an accurate picture of employee preparedness.

Across the region, the findings indicate that many employers still do not. In Australia and New Zealand in particular, the gap between near-universal confidence among HR leaders and much lower employee confidence points to a mismatch companies may struggle to ignore as AI becomes more deeply embedded in work.