68% vs 10%: ServiceNow Data Shows AI Talent Gap Splits the Field

The widest gap between companies leading on AI and everyone else is not technology — it is people. At Fortune's AIQ Summit on Friday, Diana David, ServiceNow's director of futures, said the biggest divide in ServiceNow's Enterprise AI Maturity Index shows up in attracting, hiring and retaining AI talent: 68% of "pacesetters" do it, versus 10% of other organizations.

"Talent investment. That was the biggest gap," David told moderator Jeremy Kahn, Fortune's AI editor.

What separates the AI pacesetters?

Pacesetters — the roughly 21% of surveyed organizations that scored above 60 on the 100-point index — average 74 points against 45 for the rest. Their advantages cluster on the human and organizational side:

• 57% invest in ongoing AI upskilling, versus 4% of others
• 68% attract, hire and retain AI talent, versus 10%
• 64% are on a path to unified data, versus 14%
• 57% have "a clear, strong AI vision," versus 21%

"It's really operational discipline, right?" David said. "It's not just technology, operational discipline, and transformation."

The pattern extends to deployment depth. About 59% of surveyed companies have moved past the pilot phase on autonomous workflows. But David said "only 9% are doing agentic, autonomous, multi-step workflows that are not checked by human beings at every step." Among pacesetters that share is 36%, against 2% of everyone else. These workflows are "not just one little point of sale," she said.

Why broad AI adoption is not maturity

David called "AI adoption for everyone" her "pet peeve." "I get it, because it's a great CEO story," she said. "95% of everybody has X, Y, Z. But it is not translating into productivity, and it's often not with training, and that doesn't equal maturity."

Kahn framed the problem from the executive side. Many companies handed employees AI tools and "let a thousand flowers bloom," he said, then pulled back when costs rose without productivity gains. Others dropped agents into existing workflows or swapped an employee for one.

David said the answer starts at the top. "I think it starts with leadership," she said, "growth mindset, an idea, and a vision for change of what the company can become, followed with specific training around AI and specific functions."

She urged executives to think "almost in a day zero mentality" about processes designed from scratch. The alternative is to "sprinkle AI on something probably a very old or broken process to make it go even faster. That's just not solving the problem faster."

How fast should companies move?

Asked whether redesigned processes risk obsolescence as the technology races ahead, David said companies should set a vision, align the data, choose workflows, assign ownership and "iterate." "I don't think that any company is going to succeed by doing some kind of top-down plan where one person or one strategy team is redesigning everything immediately," she said.

She pointed to ServiceNow's AI Control Tower as a way to gain cross-organization visibility. "You have to have transparency," she said. "Having the visibility from across the organization and a very strong foundation allows you to be flexible." ServiceNow produces the index; David works for the company.

The human-side deficit is broad. The report finds 59% of organizations lack long-term HR plans for AI, and 42% of employees say they are not getting enough AI training. Pacesetters' average ROI stands at 160%.

The leaders are not all tech firms. Technology companies took about one in five spots on Fortune's AIQ 75, followed by financial services. Construction and engineering took six; food and healthcare took five each. "It is everything, everywhere, all at once," David said.

The index itself has swung. After launching in 2024, the average score fell from 44 to 35 — "the noise was out there, AI was everywhere, but it hadn't really filtered in to company value," David said — before rebounding to 51 this year. "I can't promise you that there won't be another dip next year," she said.

Next year ServiceNow will add agentic AI to the AIQ, scoring companies on "what are we deploying and where" and whether they are "realizing actual commercial value." That, David said, is "what I think true maturity for business is going to mean versus everybody has, you know, AI in their pocket."