ZDNET’s key takeaways
- 56.4% of employees have no time for upskilling.
- Staff lack resources, including materials and measures.
- Continuous skills measurement could unlock AI upskilling.
AI is no longer emerging in the workplace. It’s in the office, and it’s shaping how businesses, employees, and their respective interests operate, and it’s doing so rapidly.
A new study from Workera found that 80% of companies feel they are more likely to be on track for an AI-enabled future in 2026, up from 67% last year. However, some may be missing the boat on what’s most important — their people.
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Findings from Workera’s 2026 State of Skills Intelligence Report, published Sept. 23, suggest business leaders and working professionals need to find more common ground on how to upskill for an AI world, and Kian Katanforoosh, founder and CEO of Workera, said organizations need to take the lead.
“I would advise any leader right now to think about giving [their] people time to upskill. Don’t think that they will just figure it out without you actually carving out time. With time also comes the psychological safety; give them the psychological safety to experiment [with AI],” Katanforoosh told ZDNET in an exclusive interview.
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This year’s research surveyed 1,000 salaried professionals working for organizations with 5,000 or more employees in the US. The survey was conducted in July 2026 using the market research tool Pollfish. Year-over-year measurements were obtained by comparing July 2026 results with those from a similar survey conducted with Pollfish in March 2025.
It’s uphill for AI upskill
AI skills are imperative, and both companies and employees know it. Workera’s survey found that more than two-thirds of employees (67.8%) now use AI tools beyond ChatGPT at least a couple of days a week, up from 39.9% last year. That’s nearly a 30% year-over-year increase in AI tool use.
But that rise in day-to-day use is underscored by a few less-gleaming realities.
Nearly 60% of employees said no time is allocated during work hours for upskilling (56.4%), and almost 43% mentioned a lack of relevant learning materials (42.5%) as the biggest obstacles to improving AI skills. Additionally, employees reported spending minimal time each week on skill development. Over 80% of employees spend just five hours or less per week on training (84.3%).
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Katanforoosh said AI upskilling can be cumbersome, with many employees feeling “overwhelmed” with so many ways to learn and little time built into workdays to do it. On top of this issue, the last 12 months have rapidly changed the learning landscape.
“Last year was more about adoption and access, and now we’re past that, and so it’s about outcomes and actions, which creates additional stress,” Katanforoosh said.
The 2026 metrics fluctuate minimally from last year’s results, indicating that while widespread adoption is increasing, companies are still falling short.
Last year, Workera indicated that most employees hadn’t been offered any AI-specific training opportunities. This year, nearly 6 in 10 employees said they’ve been offered AI-specific training opportunities in the last 12 months
While organizations are providing more training, they are failing to provide proper resourcing and time for employees to use AI in practice.
“People are feeling like they’re cramped; they don’t have the time to learn. On top of that, the pace of innovation has kept accelerating,” Katanforoosh said. Still, many employees try to persist.
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Just under half of employees (46.5%) said they’ve used tools not provided by their employer for skill development. Of those respondents, nearly three-quarters (74.6%) said they used fairly mainstream AI tools, including ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.
There’s an obvious gap here that needs to be closed, and Katanforoosh said it can be as simple as organizations defining what “AI-ready” means for them. Then, a better structure can begin to take shape.
“The second aspect is, if you define the standard, make sure people can measure themselves against that standard … it turns out if you have a standard and you have a measurement, and then a layer of incentives … they push people to accelerate their own learning velocity,” Katanforoosh said.
Enterprise organizations should minimize barriers to accessing AI tools. However, Katanforoosh acknowledged skills assessments, as Workera offers, can continue to encourage AI upskilling by granting employees more access as their AI skills develop, which also serves as a healthy control.
The road ahead
Organizations must remember that AI is for everyone, Katanforoosh said, and upskilling puts both businesses and employees ahead.
“It turns out, the amount of [AI] slop is probably correlated with people knowing or not knowing how to use AI, and so making sure that you train [employees] ahead ultimately pays off in terms of the [AI] slop that you will see or not see,” Katanforoosh said.
Businesses want (and need) AI-skilled employees to succeed, and employees want to feel valued and rewarded for those efforts. The bottom line is that while AI is a great asset, it’s only as smart as the people who know howto use it to optimize their tasks and workflows, and employees are well-aware of this gap. Many are betting on people.
Almost 80% (76.6%) of respondents believed they can do their job better than AI. In fact, only 9.5% of respondents said that an AI agent could do even more than half of their job effectively today.
Also: What workers are really using AI for in 2026 – and what they aren’t
What’s more, most employees also believed a human element will remain key to leveraging AI upskilling. Just 7% of respondents said that AI can already evaluate skills better than humans, and nearly two out of five (38.5%) said AI will never surpass humans at assessing skills.
While people still want to be managed by people, Workera’s survey indicated that controlled and continuous skill assessment may be a way forward that all parties can benefit from.
New developments like Workera’s Ambient, an AI-native skills assessment tool currently being piloted with over 10,000 signups on its waitlist, aim to measure skills in the flow of work.
About two-fifths (41.1%) of respondents said they’d opt into a continuous skills measurement tool like Ambient if they owned the data and controlled what’s shared, while another 31.2% were undecided.
AI and work inch closer
The report detailed that building skills is one of the most effective and affordable ways to grow, though most companies have no way to tell whether their methods are working.
Workera and Katanforoosh are working to change that situation by creating a better route for “learning velocity” with projects like Ambient.
Right now, Katanforoosh said there is a premium for learning velocity, and whoever maintains a high learning velocity has an easier time finding a job.
Historically, Katanforoosh said companies could try to maximize learning velocity by introducing skill measurements to find baselines, and then work to close the gaps as fast as possible.
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Workera is aiming to target the “continuous measure,” merging learning and work closer together than ever.
“If you manage to merge work and learning, you’re effectively helping someone learn exponentially more than in the past. Today, with AI, we’re able to bring learning closer to work because AI understands unstructured data,” Katanforoosh said.
While privacy and data security remain top priorities for organizations like Workera as they continue to innovate, Katanforoosh said products like Ambient will be a reality sooner or later, and that they’ll be forces for good.
“What tells me that this continuous learning is a good thing is one, it will maximize people’s learning velocity … But on top of that, I think the consumer and the employee are getting used to getting help from technology.”
