What Makes an Organisation Future Ready in the Age of AI?

Every organisation says it is preparing for the next five years. The leaders we interviewed named the same obstacle, and it was not the technology. It was whether their executives will change how they work. 

Future readiness is a phrase most organisations use and few can define. So, we asked senior HR and people leaders what stands between their organisation and the next five years. They work in law, professional services, technology, life sciences, and live entertainment. Every one of them says their organisation is preparing. This piece covers what that preparation looks like in practice, and what AI changes. To let them speak freely, we have not named the leaders or their organisations. Their quotes have been lightly edited for clarity. 

What Does Future Readiness Mean in Practice?

Readiness talk and readiness behaviour are two different things. Organisations describe readiness fluently, then ask nothing different of the people at the top. A talent leader in the legal sector described her former firm with no illusions. “It talks the right talk. It uses all the right language about being future ready, about strategic workforce planning, all of that good stuff,” she said. “But the ability to translate that into actions is difficult.” 

Her diagnosis was specific. “Being future ready requires a certain amount of behavioural change,” she said, “and that’s quite hard to get lawyers to do.” Swap the profession and the sentence survives. Every sector has a group whose habits set the tone. Readiness comes down to habits that partners and directors have to change first, and no plan delivers that on its own. 

The scale of what is coming is not in dispute. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 drew on more than 1,000 employers. It projects 22% of today’s jobs disrupted by 2030, with 170 million roles created and 92 million lost. Of any 100 workers, 59 need reskilling by 2030. Eleven will not get it. 

Why Do Future Readiness Plans Stall?

Readiness plans stall because they are written for one audience and land on several. An HR executive in manufacturing described a workforce split by appetite for change rather than by department, a division that appears on no org chart. Some colleagues bring “that hunger, that desire” for change. Others, often with long service, “find what we’re doing now to be highly disruptive”, because the company they work in now bears little resemblance to the one they joined. A plan written for the first group reaches the second as a threat. 

That resistance is often rational, as a life sciences executive showed when he pointed at the UK biotech market. Large players have been disinvesting, and redundancies have followed. Put a change programme into that context, then ask which group in the building feels most exposed by it, and the answer stops being a matter of personality. “Probably the older people,” he said. 

Then there is how change gets argued. An HR director at a global technology business described leaders announcing sweeping positions without the detail underneath them. “We’re going to scrap the balance sheet because we think it’s pointless. And that was the end of that. We didn’t debate it,” he said, in an example he offered as a caricature of a real habit. “Leaders are entitled to quite polarising views, minus the detail, just because they can. And that has an impact down through the org.” 

The three obstacles share a root. Each one sits with somebody senior who would have to behave differently, which is why programmes die between the announcement and anything visible changing. 

How Is AI Changing What Organisations Need?

AI is the change most of these leaders are being asked to absorb first. Every interview reached it eventually. The legal talent leader repeated her industry’s favourite formulation, then punctured it. Technology will not replace lawyers, she said, quoting the line everyone uses, but “lawyers will be replaced by lawyers who do use it”. Her follow-up is harder. “How do you convert that into a business truly?” Her old firm, in her view, had not embraced technology to the degree it needed to. 

The same WEF research shows employers split on how to respond. Some 77% plan to upskill their workers. Meanwhile 41% expect to reduce their workforce as AI automates tasks. Almost half intend to move staff out of AI-exposed roles into other parts of the business. That option asks most of managers and least of the redundancy budget. 

One interviewee has already tested that middle path. A medical technology people leader described rolling out automated services to handle internal queries, the sort of project that arrives with a business case and a confident assumption about how people will react. The reaction was fast. Some questions were never going to be answered by a chat box. “We still need some human element of it,” she said. Her team put a hybrid solution in place within days. It “does not fit 100% onto the model that we designed initially”, she said, and it holds people’s hands until they are ready for the rest. 

In other organisations, automation is already changing headcount decisions that predate AI. A people director in live entertainment watches automation reduce “the number of jobs that are available in a traditional theatre structure”. His teams can see it coming without anyone announcing it. 

Official data suggests most organisations sit closer to that example than to the headlines. Adoption is broad and shallow, a different problem from the one most boards are preparing for. ONS analysis of AI in UK businesses found it has almost tripled since late 2023, reaching around 35% of firms with 10 or more employees. Depth has barely moved. The average adopter uses 1.6 AI technologies, up from 1.4, and only 10% call their use extensive. Meanwhile 55% of employees say they use AI for work or study, so your people are ahead of your organisation. 

Which Skills Last Longer Than the Technology?

An HR leader in industry was clear about what outlasts any particular tool. Adaptability, communication, and flexibility “have much longer shelf life than particular skills that you’ve learned, that you’ve worked in, which will be through AI or through different developments, obsolete in six months’ time”. 

The fastest-growing skills in the Future of Jobs data point the same way. Skills in AI, big data, and cybersecurity are growing fastest, while analytical thinking, resilience, leadership, and collaboration remain critical. Employers are recruiting for technical and human skills at the same time. 

Those skills are formed long before anyone is hired, and the legal talent leader is blunt about where that preparation fails. The way careers services advise young people is “just not realistic for what the future of work requires”, in her view, because the future she sees is built on relationships rather than credentials. Softer skills, she argued, will come more into focus. 

The same logic changes what a CV is worth. The industrial HR leader has changed the question he asks about a candidate. “What can this person do, rather than what have they done, is much more important,” he said. He looks for that evidence in lateral moves and stretch assignments, rather than in a tidy sequence of job titles. 

How Do You Build a Future Ready Organisation?

Five practices came out of these conversations. 

• Name the behaviour that has to change, and name who has to change it. A plan that asks nothing specific of its leaders produces good language about readiness and no new behaviour. 
• Argue for change with the reasoning attached. When a leader announces a sweeping position and skips the argument behind it, the position still travels down the organisation, and people adjust to it without ever hearing why. 
• Pair every rollout with a human route. The medical technology company kept its automation and added human supervision within days, rather than waiting for the next review cycle to reopen the question. 
• Train the people you already have. Firms that report a shortage of expertise mostly retrain rather than hire, yet only 11% report training more than half their workforce on AI. 
• Recruit and move people for capability, not history. Lateral moves and stretch assignments predict what somebody can handle next better than a list of previous employers. 

Every one of those practices came from an organisation still working on it. The leaders we interviewed did not describe finished companies. They described arguments about how fast to move, and efforts to protect the people most exposed by that pace. They described checking whether the plan on paper matches what managers do week to week. Readiness, on this evidence, is something a company keeps working at rather than something it completes. 

Read the rest of the series

About the Authors

Sukran Tumay is a Managing Partner at Stanton Chase London. She specialises in the Consumer Products and Services and Life Sciences and Healthcare sectors. She has led cross-border executive search assignments across Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia. She is a Co-Active Coach and an alum of the CTI Leadership Community, and brings that coaching background to her work on leadership and succession. 

James Nathan is a Partner at Stanton Chase London, where he leads the Professional Services and Entertainment Sector practices. He specialises in executive search for board directors, partners, chief executives, and other senior leadership roles, with more than 25 years of experience across executive search and professional services. His clients range from specialist boutiques to private equity-backed businesses and global firms, and his work concentrates on senior mandates where leadership capability decides whether a business performs.