AI will dominate IT by 2030, according to a July survey by Garner that found that by 2030, all IT work will be done by humans using AI. It went on to reveal that 75% of the work will be done by people using AI, and 25% will be done by AI alone.

At the Gartner IT Symposium/Expo in Orlando beginning today, Gartner analysts during the opening keynote stressed that organizations will need to train their staffs on AI to get value from it. “While not all AI is ready to deliver value, humans are even less ready to capture value,” said Alicia Mullery, VP Analyst at Gartner. “AI readiness means AI can help you find value and effectively meet the needs of specific use cases. Human readiness is about whether you have the right workforce and organization to capture and sustain AI value.”

Audience members were told that AI won’t be taking jobs away, but rather transforming their staffs, either by moving some workers into business areas that generate revenue, or by curtailing hiring for positions of low-level tasks that do not produce revenue.

“AI will make some skills, such as summarization, information retrieval and translation, less important, as AI is ready to automate or augment these tasks,” said Mullery. “But AI also creates a need for entirely new skills. These AI skills are fundamentally different from most skills. Where skills were traditionally about doing tasks better, AI skills are about making you better — a better motivator, a better thinker and a better communicator.”

In terms of AI readiness, the analysts said organizations should look at it through the lenses of cost, technical capabilities, and AI solution providers. A May survey by Gartner showed the 72% of CIOs said their organizations wee either only breaking even or actually losing money on their AI spend. Gartner recommends analyzing the upfront and hidden costs, as well as training, to determine where to invest in their AI efforts.

Further, capabilities such as agentic AI and AI accuracy should built in-house and piloted to ensure value can be gained, Gartner suggests.

But the key to finding value in AI is the balancing of AI and human readiness, because human readiness is trailing the advances in AI technology.  As Gartner wrote in its keynote summation,  “Without preparing the workforce alongside implementing AI, organizations risk missing out on real value. True transformation and ROI from AI only happen when both technology and people are ready to work together effectively.”