92% of HR Leaders Say Staff Can Learn AI Skills — Yet Half Hire Externally

Ninety-two percent of HR professionals say their existing employees could be reskilled for AI-related roles — yet 51% of those same professionals report their organizations fill new AI positions by hiring externally. That contradiction sits at the center of a new Careerminds white paper, The AI Redeployment Gap: What Companies Lose by Hiring over Reskilling, published with research conducted by Censuswide.

The stakes are straightforward. As companies restructure work around artificial intelligence (the technology driving most current workforce planning decisions), they face a choice: retrain the people they already employ or buy talent from a tight market. The Careerminds data suggests most organizations say one thing and do another — and the white paper argues the discrepancy carries a measurable cost.

What the research actually found

Censuswide surveyed 595 US HR professionals and 547 US people managers, ages 25–65, at organizations with 500 to 10,000 or more employees. Fieldwork ran May 15–26, 2026.

The headline numbers:

• 92% of HR professionals and 88% of people managers believe employees within their organizations could be reskilled for AI-related roles.
• 51% of HR professionals and 47% of people managers report their organizations hire externally for new AI-related positions.
• Only 42% in each group report redeploying existing employees into those roles.
• 43% of HR professionals and 34% of managers cite limited visibility into individual skill sets as a barrier to identifying who should be reskilled.

The pattern is consistent across both respondent groups: confidence in employee capability runs high, while internal movement runs low. Mark Saddic, senior partner at Careerminds, put it bluntly in the press release: "Companies are investing in AI while potentially overlooking one of their most valuable resources: the people they already employ."

Take that framing with a caveat. The research was commissioned by a workforce solutions vendor whose business includes redeployment and outplacement services — a company with a commercial interest in documenting that internal talent is underused. The survey sample is also US-only and limited to mid-size and large organizations, so the findings may not describe smaller employers.

Why can't companies spot the employees worth reskilling?

The white paper identifies a visibility problem as the central mechanism behind the gap. Employers cannot reskill people they cannot see. When 43% of HR professionals and 34% of managers say limited visibility into individual skill sets blocks reskilling decisions, they are describing organizations that lack a working inventory of what their current workforce can do.

This problem is not new, and the market has already responded. In September, education giant Pearson agreed to acquire Workera, an AI-native skills platform used by ServiceNow, Accenture, and the US Space Force. That deal targeted the same workplace friction Careerminds now quantifies: employers need granular, current data on employee skills before they can move people into AI roles.

The numbers on stated intent deserve particular scrutiny. According to the Careerminds data, 87% of HR professionals and 84% of managers believe their organizations adequately consider reskilling employees for future roles. The findings suggest these organizations believe they prioritize internal talent development even though their hiring practices reveal otherwise. Self-reported belief and observed behavior point in opposite directions — a result that should temper any confidence in corporate reskilling pledges.

In plain words: nearly nine in ten HR leaders think their company handles reskilling well, but barely four in ten actually redeploy people.

How does the gap vary by industry?

The redeployment shortfall is not uniform. The research reveals significant differences in how industries respond to AI-related workforce needs.

• In technology and telecom, external hiring outpaces redeployment by 15 percentage points.
• Media and entertainment is the only surveyed sector where both groups report redeployment at least as frequently as external hiring. Among HR professionals in that industry, 56% report redeploying employees versus 25% who hire externally.

The technology-sector result is the counterintuitive one. The industry building AI tools is also the industry most likely to shop outside for AI talent rather than retrain its own staff. The white paper does not explain why, and the survey data alone cannot settle whether tech employers face genuine skill scarcity or simply find external hiring more convenient.

What does hiring externally actually cost?

The cost argument comes from separate research by The Josh Bersin Company, cited in the Careerminds white paper. Its findings: external hiring can cost three to five times more than filling comparable roles internally, and it takes up to 20 days longer on average.

Those figures reframe the redeployment gap from a talent-culture issue into a budget line. If external AI hires cost multiples of internal moves and slow time-to-fill by roughly three weeks, the 51% of organizations leaning on external hiring are paying a premium for a strategy their own HR leaders say is unnecessary — given that 92% of them believe current employees could do the jobs.

A caveat applies here as well. The cost comparison comes from a second-hand citation within Careerminds' own white paper, and the underlying methodology is not detailed in the source material. Three-to-five-times is a wide range, and "up to 20 days" is an upper bound, not an average outcome every employer should expect.

What comes next

The findings land amid broader evidence that workers are already using AI in daily work while lacking structured time to upskill — a tension ZDNET's own coverage of the survey highlights. Pearson's acquisition of Workera shows vendors moving to sell employers the skills-visibility tooling that 43% of HR professionals say they lack. The open question the Careerminds data raises but cannot answer is whether the redeployment gap persists because employers cannot see internal skills, or because external hiring remains the culturally default path — and closing the visibility gap alone may not change the behavior.