85% of companies want AI agents, but 76% aren't ready for the change

Most organizations see potential in AI agents and plan to adopt them, but there is a critical gap between ambition and practical readiness. The study found a worrying statistic: while 85% of companies want to launch AI agents within three years, 76% admit that their current infrastructure and processes are completely unready for the transition.

The ambition paradox

The survey numbers speak for themselves: the gap between desire and reality has reached catastrophic proportions. Companies recognize the transformative potential of AI agents. They can automate entire classes of routine work, free employees for more strategic tasks, and raise overall operational efficiency by 20–40%. But organizations ignore or systematically underestimate the scale and complexity of the changes required.

This is not merely a technical job of running cables and installing new servers. Deploying AI agents demands a fundamental rethink of the entire organizational architecture: reworking established business processes, retraining existing staff, and replacing outdated IT systems that are often incompatible with modern technologies. Companies often expect quick results ("buy the system, launch it, done") but meet resistance at every organizational level.

Three main barriers

The study identified three main obstacles that effectively block companies on the path to building genuinely agentic organizations:

• Shortage of qualified staff — most employees lack the skills needed to work with modern AI systems, and retraining and adapting them requires a serious investment of time and training budget
• Archaic business processes — workflows designed and optimized for people to perform tasks manually are, by their very logic, incompatible with the automated approach of AI agents
• Incompatible IT infrastructure — old, outdated technology systems often cannot integrate properly with modern AI agents because of technical limitations and architectural conflicts between systems

Each of these factors is a serious obstacle in its own right to successful adoption. Together, they create an almost insurmountable barrier that requires work on three separate fronts at once and coordinated effort across the whole organization.

There is also a hidden but powerful psychological barrier: employees in many companies naturally fear that mass automation of their functions will sooner or later lead to layoffs and lost jobs. For their part, management often lacks a clear vision of how the organization should restructure, and how to redefine roles and responsibilities in a company that works in close integration with AI agents.

Redefining organizational design

Companies need a completely new paradigm of organizational design. Instead of the familiar hierarchical structure with clearly defined positions and functions, they need a flexible, adaptive system in which people and AI agents work in close synergy and complement each other.

"This is not about replacing people with machines, but about

redefining what people do and how they do it," says one of the study's authors.

Companies need to invest in three areas at the same time: retraining and reskilling employees, modernizing outdated IT infrastructure, and radically overhauling management processes and structures. This calls not for sequential steps, but for a coordinated, synchronized push on all fronts at once.

What this means

Organizations worldwide stand at a historic crossroads, where choices made in the coming months will determine their competitive position for years. Companies that start serious preparation right now — consistently retraining and adapting staff, modernizing technology systems, and reworking and rethinking all business processes — will gain a strong competitive advantage and set new standards of efficiency and innovation in their industry. Those who wait for better times, hoping the problem will somehow resolve itself, risk being left with morally and technically obsolete infrastructure that is incompatible with the future.

The window of opportunity for a careful, thoughtful transition is closing fast, and delay is already dangerous.