The Blog
AI Enablement is no doubt sitting fairly high in your list of priorities for 2026, so we ran a Roundtable in May to ask L&D leaders what AI Enablement actually means, how far along are they on that journey and what is still unknown.
We’re not AI experts so we didn’t come to Roundtable with advice, just some stats to frame the current state of play and a playback of the biggest challenges leaders had shared with us when they signed up. Armed with this, a Miro board and a room full of eager L&D leaders, we let the discussion emerge.
The first question was a Mentimeter check-in: One word to describe where your organisation is with AI.
The answers: exploratory, messy, confusion, confused, disorganised, skeptical, in progress. And then this one, which we were all super curious to hear more about (not just because it broke the one word rule) "selling it as a product but not mastering it ourselves yet", which highlighted the reality that maybe we’re talking about it more than we understand it.
We all reflected on the noise we’re reading and seeing, especially on LinkedIn. The reality inside businesses is a lot different to what they want you to believe, so if you’re not “there” yet, take a breath, you’re not alone..
An April 2026 report from Amazon and Strand Partners on UK AI maturity suggested that 49% of businesses are in the same experimental, ungoverned stage and under 1% have reached anything like genuine transformation.
You’d expect these stats to be improving year on year as more companies grow in maturity, but the reality is that they are staying static. McKinsey said in their recent report (worth a read) that 70% of AI initiatives in 2025 failed, which is a lot of wasted time and tokens. What’s going wrong?
According to McKinsey’s research, tech isn’t the problem, which is accelerating at breakneck speed. The issues that are stalling maturity are leadership alignment, budget and cost uncertainty, workforce planning, systems integrations and a lack of trust in the accuracy of AI models.
The issues that are stalling maturity are leadership alignment, budget and cost uncertainty, workforce planning, systems integrations and a lack of trust in the accuracy of AI models.
The AI reports were reflective of the experience of those at the Roundtable. We asked them to share their biggest challenges with AI Enablement with four key themes emerging:
Notice that none of these are ‘tech’ issues but people, communication and leadership challenges. We split the roundtable groups across two challenges: lack of clarity and leadership capability. The conversations went quickly to the same place from different angles and were aligned about what was working and what wasn’t.
Everybody had access and budgets to use AI. Whilst some have a limit and have to justify their usage, most companies are happy for their teams to be experimenting and are supportive with flexible token spending.
Senior leaders don’t have their heads in the sand on AI and they know it’s a business imperative. They are feeling the pressure themselves from their board and they know they need to do something. Some noted that AI enablement is outside of their senior team’s comfort zones and represented an existential crisis not just for their leadership team, but for their business model as a whole.
As coaches, we were very pleased to hear that there’s a genuine desire to protect the inclusion of human judgement, critical thinking and overall control and not just hand everything over to AI agents. There was an acknowledgement of the weaknesses of AI and that it’s not something you can put 100% faith in. Checks and balances are necessary, and we’re pleased to see the value of human interaction is still very much valued.
The instruction around AI enablement comes down as a general pressure “Go and use AI” rather than clear direction, governance and expectations. People don’t know what good looks like and managers are left to translate what that means and put it into practice creating that sense of confusion and chaos.
Who is supposed to be setting the direction? Lots of middle managers are waiting to be told what to do and how to do it. We challenged this expectation - the exec team don’t know what you do or how you do it - what are you hoping they will tell you? Direction and governance should come top down, but execution needs to be bottom up.
Who owns AI Enablement? Is it actually something that belongs to everybody? What are your ethics around using it? What’s your level of security? How are you enforcing and monitoring security risks? Which jobs are at risk? In the rush to adopt and catch up, important questions aren’t being answered. This is creating tech and people debt across businesses. Slowing down is necessary to get alignment at a leadership level before employees can be truly focused in the right places.
If any of this has resonated, then you are not alone. We didn’t provide an action plan in the session, just an honest read of the state of play and some things to try out, and by several people's own admission, there was a bit of relief that they weren't as far behind as they'd felt.
Since that session, we’ve reflected and posed some coaching questions you can ask yourself and your senior team to start getting clarity and reducing the chaos:
Download our one pager takeaway
We’ve created a new Masterclass: Leading AI Change, a 2.5-hour session for managers and L&D leaders who are navigating this without a clear map from above. It's NOT a course on how to use AI. It's about how to lead when the ground is still moving and use an experimentation approach to make progress.
We're looking for five organisations to co-design it with us and we’ll deliver it for your teams at a reduced rate. If that sounds useful, get in touch.
Executive Coach, Forbes Coaches Council member, Board advisor and facilitator.
Executive Coach, Forbes Coaches Council member, Board advisor and facilitator.
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