Cisco’s second annual CEO survey on artificial intelligence, fielded in January 2026 by Opinion Matters across 2,511 chief executives in 23 countries, found that 65% now fear their company is underinvesting in AI, up from 53% a year earlier. That anxiety is reshaping CEO priority lists in a way HR should notice: upgrading AI infrastructure ranks first, but upskilling the workforce ranks second, ahead of deploying AI agents, building ROI-measurement systems, or fixing security and governance gaps.
The sequencing matters more than the anxiety. CEOs are still treating infrastructure as the first move and people as the second, which means workforce-readiness budgets tend to arrive after the technology decisions are already locked in rather than shaping them. Cisco’s data on its highest-performing “Pacesetter” companies complicates that order: 100% of Pacesetters already provide internal AI training, and 64% also bring in external experts, more than double the global average. The companies furthest ahead did not treat upskilling as a follow-on step.
The original insight here is a timing problem, not a budget problem. If upskilling is CEOs’ second priority behind infrastructure, HR and L&D leaders have a narrow window, while infrastructure decisions are still being made, to insert workforce-readiness planning into that roadmap rather than receiving it as a mandate after deployment. That is also the gap that new reskilling infrastructure, like the billion-dollar RAISE US coalition is trying to build capacity to fill, but coalition-level infrastructure only helps if individual companies are pulling HR into the sequencing conversation early enough to use it.
Source: Cisco
