Aon Report: 73% of Firms Deploy AI, Only 18% Reskilled Staff

Seventy-three percent of organisations globally have deployed or are piloting artificial intelligence, but only 18% say most of their workforce was reskilled or upskilled in the previous year. That 55-point gap is the sharpest concrete finding in Aon's new megatrends report on resilience for Australian businesses, released on 11 November 2026, and it frames the professional services firm's central argument: companies are buying technology faster than they are preparing the people expected to use it.

Aon's report examines how trade, technology, weather and workforce pressures interact across four domains — operations, people, capital and strategy. Its core claim is straightforward. Interconnected risks are reshaping operations and investment decisions, and businesses that build flexibility into decision-making can both protect value and pursue growth.

The stakes are practical rather than abstract. For Australian businesses, the report identifies concentrated exposure to single suppliers, technologies, infrastructure or specialist skills as the weak points that become visible only when external conditions shift quickly. Aon's answer is not a new insurance product or a crisis playbook. It is a decision-making framework.

What does the report actually recommend?

Aon proposes that leaders assess major decisions through four connected lenses: capital, operations, people and risk. The framework is designed to help organisations identify dependencies, weigh trade-offs and decide where added flexibility may create value, according to the report.

The four-lens approach reflects a shift in how resilience is discussed at board level. Rather than treating resilience solely as crisis preparation, Aon presents it as a factor in day-to-day strategic choices involving investment, staffing and supply arrangements.

In plain words: Aon wants executives to treat resilience as something they decide, not something they react to.

What did Aon's Australia CEO say?

Kevan Johnston, Chief Executive Officer of Australia at Aon, said resilience now sits closer to core management decisions than it has historically.

"Resilience is no longer simply about preparing for disruption. It is about giving organisations the flexibility and confidence to keep making decisions when circumstances change," Johnston said.

He said the process starts with identifying where a business is most exposed. "For business leaders in Australia, that means understanding critical dependencies and making deliberate choices about where resilience can create the greatest value," he said.

Johnston framed the payoff in investment terms. "The opportunity is to build resilience into major business decisions, giving leaders greater confidence to invest, adapt and pursue growth," he said.

Three quotes, one message: resilience as confidence to act, not insulation against shock. What Aon does not provide in the release is quantified evidence that the four-lens framework improves outcomes — the report argues the case conceptually rather than with performance data.

Where does the workforce gap come from?

The figures come from Aon's 2026 Human Capital Trends Study. The numbers break down as follows:

• 73% of organisations globally have deployed AI or are piloting it.
• 18% say most of their workforce was reskilled or upskilled in the previous year.

Aon reads the divergence as evidence that many businesses are adopting technology faster than they are preparing staff for it. The workforce dimension is central to the report's findings: investments in AI and other technologies can fall short if employees are not prepared to use new tools or adapt to changing operating models.

The report argues workforce readiness should sit alongside technical and financial planning, not after them. It points to three factors that determine whether technology projects deliver expected outcomes: skills development, governance structures and reliable data systems. The implication for AI buyers is direct — the 73% deployment figure says nothing about whether deployments produce value, and the 18% reskilling figure hints at why many may not.

Takeaway: the gap between adoption and preparation is where AI investment goes to die.

Which risks does Aon flag?

The report identifies several interacting sources of disruption for Australian businesses:

• Weather. Aon says weather disruption affects physical assets, supply chains and workforce availability simultaneously — one event, three exposure channels.
• Global trade. Changes in trade conditions can alter access to supplies and technology while increasing operating costs.
• Concentration risk. Dependency on single suppliers, technologies, infrastructure or specialist skills creates fragility that stays hidden until external conditions move fast.

The report's distinctive move is treating these as connected rather than separate. Changes in international markets can have knock-on effects on supply chains, technology access and input costs, meaning a decision in one area can quickly affect another. Trade conditions, workforce readiness and technology governance sit in the same risk picture.

Aon positions resilience accordingly: a cross-functional issue rather than a narrow risk management exercise. The report suggests leaders examine how exposures in one part of an organisation may affect performance elsewhere. That is easier to recommend than to execute — the release does not describe how companies should measure cross-functional exposure in practice.

Why does this matter for AI buyers?

The AI angle gives the report its sharpest edge. Aon links AI spending to questions around infrastructure, governance and workforce skills, and argues companies need to align those three factors to turn investment into business value.

The 73% deployment figure indicates AI has moved from experiment to standard practice in most large organisations. The 18% reskilling figure indicates the human infrastructure has not kept pace. Aon's own data, in other words, supports its own thesis — and gives Australian executives a concrete diagnostic for their next technology decision.

The report's framing also marks a subtle shift for a firm whose core business has long been risk transfer. Aon is arguing that the cheaper option is often structural: understanding dependencies before disruption prices them for you.

What happens next?

The report's practical test will be whether Australian boards adopt the four-lens framework in live decisions — capital allocation, staffing, supplier selection — or file it alongside previous resilience frameworks. Johnston's closing claim sets the benchmark: leaders who embed resilience into major decisions gain "greater confidence to invest, adapt and pursue growth." Confidence, in this telling, is the deliverable; the 2026 Human Capital Trends data suggests most organisations still have a workforce gap to close before they can bank it.