Organisations are buying AI faster than people can learn it

The deployment curve and the capability curve are not moving together. New research from Slalom, drawing on responses from more than 400 UK and Ireland business leaders, finds that 70% of organisations are giving employees access to AI tools, but only 48% are allocating time for those employees to experiment with them. The gap between those two numbers is where the ROI goes missing.

54% of organisations now name the workforce skills gap as the single biggest barrier to getting a return on AI investment. [secondary] That is not a technology problem. The technology is already in the building. It is a time and structure problem, and it sits squarely in HR’s lap.

The tools are deployed. The calendar is not.

The pattern is familiar from every prior enterprise technology wave: procurement outruns enablement, and the gap gets called a “change management challenge” until it becomes a write-off. What is different with AI is the speed of the cycle and the degree to which the tools are embedded directly into individual workflows. A misconfigured ERP sits in a back-office system. A poorly understood AI assistant sits inside every employee’s daily work, generating outputs that look plausible whether or not the person using it knows what they are doing.

Slalom’s wider 2025 research, covering 2,000 leaders across five geographies, also found a sharp divide between executive confidence and frontline readiness. CEOs were the most optimistic about AI’s impact; CHROs were among the most cautious. That gap in perception is itself a risk. If the people responsible for workforce capability are less convinced than the people signing the procurement contracts, the learning infrastructure will keep being treated as optional.

The fix is not a training course. It is protected time, role-specific framing, and a learning culture that treats experimentation as work rather than a distraction from it. Organisations that provide access without providing space are not deploying AI. They are deploying liability.