Aon released its first Human Capital Trends Study, pointing to a gap in enterprise AI strategies: companies know people will determine whether AI works, yet workforce investment still trails technology deployment.
The professional services firm found that 88% of employers expect AI to require new skills across their workforce.
Human capabilities such as adaptability, leadership, and change management ranked ahead of technical skills as the most important success factors over the next three years.
The spending pattern does not match that view. Aon reports that 73% of organisations have deployed or are piloting AI programmes, but only 18% say most of their workforce took part in reskilling or upskilling over the past year.
Aon links the gap to AI strategies built without clear ties to business objectives, operating models, or workforce capability needs. That creates a familiar enterprise problem: technology moves faster than the organisation around it.
Only 28% of surveyed organisations have recruited employees with AI expertise. That suggests many companies expect to develop talent internally, though their training investment does not yet support that ambition.
According to Beinsure analysts, this mismatch creates operational risk for insurers, brokers, reinsurers, and corporate risk teams using AI in underwriting, claims, pricing, service, fraud detection, and compliance. Weak adoption controls turn promising tools into uneven workflows. Sometimes worse.
Greg Case, Aon’s president and CEO, said AI winners will lead with strong people strategies. He described AI as a major growth opportunity for organisations that move people and technology together, closing the gap between ambition and readiness.
Aon said many organisations are adding AI faster than they build the skills, structures, and human frameworks needed to use it effectively. Short-term efficiency still dominates.
The study found that 80% of organisations cite automating routine tasks as a main AI goal, while only 35% prioritise workforce reskilling and upskilling.
At the same time, 84% of employers believe human strengths will become more important as automation expands. Another 37% of leaders identify future workforce skills gaps as their main concern over the next five to 10 years.
That misalignment matters because workforce readiness connects directly to business outcomes. Aon said unclear expectations, weak governance, and slow readiness efforts can lead to slower AI adoption, fragmented decisions, and higher operational or reputational risk.
AI success depends on people, but most organisations still invest mainly in the technology. Aon also found that organisations further ahead in AI deployment tend to show better alignment between technology and workforce strategy.
Companies with fully implemented AI are more than twice as likely to describe leadership commitment to employee wellbeing as strong and visible than those that have only discussed AI without action.
The study links that pattern to workforce sustainability, engagement, and trust. In plain terms, companies that treat AI as an operating change, not a software purchase, appear better placed to scale it.
Aon points to several priorities for employers: connect AI strategy with workforce planning, assess future capability needs, and invest in structured reskilling and upskilling across the organisation.
For insurers and other financial services firms, the question now isn’t whether AI enters the workflow. The harder question is whether employees are ready to use it without creating new risk.
