Nearly one-third of companies haven’t deployed any AI tech in HR yet, study finds

As many companies pour millions of dollars into AI and push employees to become more productive with the technology, some people teams—those responsible for preparing the workforce for that transformation—are actually still trying to figure out how to transform themselves, according to findings from a recent survey.

While organizations are moving ahead, trying to execute on strong ambitions to build out AI infrastructure and increase adoption and productivity (despite the fact that 100% of technology budgets are maintaining or growing in size), progress may be slow, especially for those lacking a workforce and culture ready for AI activation and grow adoption. And the HR function itself, tasked with helping build that AI-ready workforce and culture, has some catching up to do, according to the 2026 State of Workforce Transformation study conducted by AI-powered people intelligence platform Surface by Paradigm.

Some 31% of organizations have not deployed AI tech inside their HR department at all, according to the survey. Though HR has the “clearest mandate to build the conditions for workforce transformation,” it’s lagging in applying those demands on itself.

Organizations are signaling that AI is a major business priority and continuing to fund the technology, but those investments don’t automatically translate into an AI-ready workforce. For HR, that can be a particularly challenging ask: help employees navigate changing jobs, skills, and workflows, while also figuring out how AI can transform HR’s own work.

Businesses and execs have high ambitions (and budgets) for AI tech transformation. Money doesn’t appear to be a limiting resource: 49% of organizations are actively increasing their HR technology budgets, and 51% are maintaining them.

The ongoing AI transformation is “fundamentally” a people transformation, according to Salesforce’s chief equality and engagement officer, Alexandra Siegel, who, back in January at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), said how we build an AI fluent workforce changes how work gets done.

“The technology is important, but this is a people transformation because AI is going to be as ubiquitous as email, as the internet, as the mobile phone, and no one taught us. We didn’t go to class to learn how to use your iPhone. We didn’t go to class to learn how to use the internet or email. It became an extension of how we work. However, the how we work changed, and so there’s a lot of great research that shows it’s not actually those technical skills that are the most important,” Siegel said.

The news is a pile on of woes for HR teams amid the AI transformation, as CHROs are less optimistic about the AI readiness inside their orgs than other C-suite execs, HR Brew previously reported.

“As we learn more and more about AI and what great looks like and how to drive full value realization out of AI, it’s becoming more and more clear that it’s less about the technology and more around things like people enablement, upskilling, manager effectiveness, redesigning jobs,” Fran Maxwell, global leader of people and change at Protiviti, previously told HR Brew of his findings.