Business leaders are not short on problems they want the current tech boom to solve. And Deloitte’s 2026 Global Human Capital Trends report, which surveyed thousands of executives and workers globally, finds the list is getting longer. What’s also getting clearer is how few organizations have the cultural and structural foundations to actually get there.
However, in many ways, the gap between what leaders need and what they’ve built appears to be significant. The report identifies three pain points topping the leadership agenda:
- A workforce that can’t absorb change fast enough
- AI deployments that are outrunning accountability and trust
- Organizational structures that were built for a different era
Problem one: Workers are hitting a wall on change
One-third of workers surveyed experienced 15 major organizational changes in a single year. The effects are showing up in wellbeing, workload, clarity and engagement. The old model of managing change through episodic programs and top-down communications is struggling to keep pace.
Leaders know it. Eighty-five percent say building the organization’s and workforce’s ability to adapt continuously is critical. Only 27% say their organizations manage change well. And just 7% report they are leading in helping their workforce continuously grow and adapt.
“Organizations are facing a new reality,” wrote Simona Spelman, U.S. human capital leader at Deloitte. “Change is relentless and the old playbook can’t keep up. Leaders need to build adaptability into how work gets done so that their people have clarity, trust and the support to evolve with AI and the shifting demands of work. That’s how the human edge becomes a competitive advantage.”
What leaders want AI to do here is embed support directly into the work with real-time feedback, in-the-moment learning and adaptive tools that help people adjust as priorities and skills requirements shift.
Deloitte calls the destination “changefulness”: a continuous organizational capacity rather than a managed event. The report finds that the organizations furthest along have stopped treating adaptability as a program and started treating it as infrastructure.
Problem two: AI is in the decisions, but accountability isn’t
Sixty percent of executives are using AI in decision-making, but only 5% say they manage it well. The gap between adoption and governance is at the center of what Deloitte calls “culture debt”: the cost organizations accumulate when they scale AI without maintaining the accountability structures, norms and trust frameworks around it.
Fifty-six percent of leaders say they design AI for business outcomes. Only 40% design for both business and human outcomes, including fairness, skills development and the day-to-day experience of work. Forty-two percent of workers say their organizations aren’t evaluating AI’s impact on people at all.
“The real transformation isn’t adding humans and machines together, it’s redesigning work with clear decision rights and trust thresholds to deliver exponential value as human and machine capabilities converge in the work itself,” wrote David Mallon, U.S. human capital head of research and chief futurist, Deloitte.
He says that organizations that intentionally design how humans and AI interact can “unlock better outcomes and more meaningful work. Without that design, AI can create confusion and culture debt just as quickly as it scales productivity.”
The cultural friction is already measurable. Sixty-five percent of organizations believe their culture needs to change significantly because of AI. Thirty-four percent say culture is currently blocking their AI transformation goals.
Leaders are hoping for AI that builds rather than erodes trust. The report finds that organizations making the most progress are the ones that have defined clear decision rights for AI use, prioritized transparency about where and how AI is deployed and invested in the critical thinking skills that let employees work alongside it effectively.
Read more: Is your workforce planning built for a world that no longer exists?
Problem three: The org chart is slowing things down
Seven in 10 business leaders say their primary competitive strategy over the next three years is to be fast and nimble. Most of them are running organizations structured for the opposite.
The report finds that traditional functions such as HR, finance, IT and legal were designed for efficiency and control within defined boundaries. That architecture creates silos that impede the cross-functional collaboration AI transformation requires. Sixty-six percent of C-suite leaders say those functions must change. Only 7% say they are making progress toward it.
Leaders want AI to enable a more fluid operating model, one where expertise moves to the work rather than staying locked in a function, where outcomes drive design rather than org chart lines and where learning is embedded in operations rather than offloaded to a training calendar.
HR occupies a particular position in this problem. It is both one of the traditional functions the report says must change and the function best placed to lead the redesign. The report points to this as the defining HR opportunity in the current moment.
“HR’s future hinges on helping the organization operate differently, ” wrote Kyle Forrest, U.S. future of HR leader, Deloitte. “As work becomes more dynamic and skills-based, HR has a chance to lead a shift away from rigid functional silos toward a model where expertise moves to the work, work is designed around outcomes and learning is continuous, not episodic.”
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