Dive Brief:
- Nearly half (45%) of business leaders say they would pay 11% to 15% more for talent with strong artificial intelligence skills, according to KPMG’s latest AI Pulse survey.
- The research underscores how quickly AI investment has become a core corporate priority, with respondents projecting average spending of $207 million over the next 12 months — nearly double year-earlier levels.
- “AI’s potential value is no longer in question,” the Big Four accounting and consulting firm said in a Tuesday press release. “However, realizing that value depends on how effectively and securely organizations can reengineer work at enterprise scale.”
Dive Insight:
The report comes as companies with large AI budgets face growing pressure to sharpen their investment strategies and demonstrate returns.
A recent Gartner survey found that CFOs rank acquiring and developing AI and digital talent for the finance function as their top near-term challenge.
“CFOs will find hiring AI and digital talent to meet their top challenge is not easy, and it’s expensive,” Mallory Bulman, senior director analyst in Gartner’s finance practice, said in a press release last week. “In the near term, they should focus on upskilling their existing workforce to close digital capability gaps and drive more value from the tools they already own.”
Despite growing confidence in AI’s potential, execution remains a challenge, according to KPMG. When asked to report primary return-on-investment barriers, nearly two-thirds of respondents (65%) cited difficulty scaling AI use cases, up from 33% last quarter, while 62% pointed to skills gaps, up from 25%.
Most business leaders (87%) are prioritizing upskilling and reskilling to build an AI-ready organization, while 68% are focused on hiring new talent, KPMG found.
The urgency is growing as deployment of AI agents reaches a tipping point, the report said. Just 11% of organizations were using them in early 2024, mostly in pilot programs. That figure now stands at 54%, signaling a rapid shift into production environments, according to KPMG.
“AI outcomes increasingly depend on workforce readiness,” Rahsaan Shears, aIQ program lead at KPMG, said in the Tuesday release. “The limiting factor isn’t the technology — it’s whether people have the skills to direct AI, apply judgment and take responsibility for results.”
KPMG polled 237 U.S.-based C-suite and business leaders representing organizations with annual revenue of $1 billion or more. The survey was conducted between Feb. 17 and March 17.