According to the Accenture study “Talent Reinventors: Delivering Value with and For People,” only 43% of organizations are preparing workers to use AI effectively. Furthermore, many companies do not value internal talent and 45% of employees struggle to identify growth opportunities. “The organizations that will achieve results are those that invest in people with the same ambition with which they invest in technology,” explains Roberta Marracino, Talent Lead of Accenture Italia
While companies are investing more and more in artificial intelligence, at the same time an increasingly clear gap is emerging: 86% of organizations invest in AI, but only 43% are preparing their workers to use it effectively and, consequently, only 19% of them believe they have the skills necessary to work effectively with AI. This is what emerges from the new Accenture study entitled Talent Reinventors: Delivering Value with and For People - based on 1,320 C-suite executives and 4,560 employees from 20 sectors and 12 countries in North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific -, which highlights how this distance is already influencing the ability of companies around the world to generate concrete value from AI. “The real challenge for leadership is not only technological, but organizational: it concerns the way in which companies rethink work, develop new skills and drive transformation, which cannot be seen as a program with a beginning and an end but a continuous reinvention - explains Roberta Marracino, Talent Lead of Accenture Italia - The organizations that will obtain results are those that integrate AI into the heart of processes and invest in people with the same ambition with which they invest in technology”.
The “Talent Reinventors”
However, Accenture's research also identifies a small group, equal to 18% of the organizations analysed, defined as "Talent Reinventors", who are going beyond experiments and managing to obtain measurable results from the adoption of artificial intelligence. These companies are rethinking work, creating the conditions for collaboration and co-learning between people and AI to become a fundamental part of daily activities, integrating artificial intelligence into key processes and continuously developing the skills of the workforce. The results are significant: compared to other organizations, “Talent Reinventors” record improvements in corporate culture (7 times higher), employee experience (6 times higher) and workforce adaptability (4 times). Furthermore, they also report revenue growth of 1.8% and profits of 1.4% in 2025.
The psychological impact of the transition to AI
The transition towards AI is also having a significant impact on people: 55% of workers report situations of cognitive overload and 49% fear that artificial intelligence could have effects on their employment. Accenture research highlights that the ability to generate value from AI therefore increasingly depends not only on technology but on leadership, the visibility of skills and psychological safety in organizations.
The valorization of talents within companies
Furthermore, the Accenture study highlights, many companies still struggle to enhance internal talent: almost 70% continue to rely mainly on external or ad hoc hiring, while 45% of employees struggle to identify growth opportunities within the company. The most advanced organizations, however, are moving from an approach to talent based primarily on external hiring to a strategy in which continuous training becomes an integral part of daily work. "Talent Reinventors", for example, are 7.2 times more likely to hire from within and 16.5 times more likely to have real-time visibility of the skills present in the company, allowing people to be reallocated more quickly towards higher value roles.
What is the situation in Italy?
The topic of how companies can make the most of their investments in AI was also addressed in a recent episode of Progress, an in-depth analysis by Sky TG24 in which Roberta Marracino, Talent Lead of Accenture Italia, participated. "What is missing is that we are only looking at one part of the equation, that of technological investment, without thinking about what the elements may be that facilitate the application of GenAI, in particular the organization and the people. Technology is not enough, we must also think about how the organization and the people who are then called to lead this transformation must change", explained Marracino, also commenting on the study on "Talent Reinventors" and underlining that if "only 18% manage to combine the strategy together on AI, organizational strategy and people strategy, in Italy this 18% is 3%, in Germany it is 9%, in France it is 10%, always very small numbers that must necessarily grow". And on Italy he observed: "The paradox is that employees, particularly Italian ones who are better positioned than their international colleagues, are much more ready to embrace this type of technology because 61% in Italy are fully aware that their growth path depends on the ability to know how to use artificial intelligence".
How do people prepare for this transformation
According to Marracino, the narrative must be changed inside and outside companies, "where until now there has been a lot of talk about the alternative between AI and people, to instead arrive at a concept and an approach that is accompanying. AI that enhances people's work, like a track that goes forward in parallel. This is important because AI does not replace people, but puts them in a position to do their work differently". So, how do you build these skills? “First of all, they are organizational skills, so we need to start thinking about how the organization needs to change, how we need to rebuild around a different way of working, not thinking about attaching the new to processes or structures that are designed for a different world, so everything needs to be rethought - explained the Talent Lead of Accenture Italia - Then we need to work a lot on building people's skills: let's remember that on an overall level, across all sectors, around 44% of people's total time is impacted by AI. it does not mean that it is replaced, but it means that a part of these activities will be affected, in some sectors such as banking even at 73-74%. We cannot think of approaching this transformation with an old vision".
Three types of skills needed
The skills needed to face this journey are of three types, Marracino finally explained: "The technical skills, which are those that are most easily taught: how to do prompting, how to use the tools. Then there are the functional skills, which are those that help evaluate the results, therefore the output of the AI. Finally, there are, to be further strengthened, the behavioral skills: those that activate critical evaluation, critical judgement, the ability to make a decision based on a certain type of machine result, the ability to distinguish whether the response is sufficiently innovative or non-innovative and, last but not least, the ability to evaluate the underlying risks".
