Business leaders entered 2026 with a winning combination of confidence and caution, according to the latest Forbis Mathers Executive Barometer. 92% of executives surveyed had a positive outlook for their organization’s growth.
AI has emerged as the external trend most likely to impact businesses over the next 12 months, cited by 40% of respondents. At the same time, enterprise IT and technology transformation is ranked as the top strategic priority for the next three to five years by 39%.
Taken together, these findings tell a clear story of how AI has moved from the edge of corporate experimentation to the center of strategy. It is now a core board issue, along with growth, competitiveness and transformation.
Barometers clarify the broader picture as well. As leaders continue to invest in growth, they operate in an environment shaped by economic pressures, increased competition, regulatory demands, and persistent uncertainty.
The real challenge of governance begins with the combination of optimism and instability. While enthusiasm for AI is widespread, the readiness to properly leverage it is far less certain.
The barometer suggests this tension. For the first time, we independently measure confidence in AI readiness and report that 94% of executives believe their organization is ready for AI.
However, the report points to weak trust in talent-related issues and emphasizes the need for strategic intervention from leaders to use AI responsibly. It also highlights data security as a key investment area in the broader technology transition.
Given the factors involved, boards need to ask tougher questions than whether a company is adopting AI. The real question is whether organizations are ready to deploy AI safely, responsibly, and in a way that creates measurable business value.
To get a serious answer, you need more than just the emotions of management. Determining whether AI efforts scale or stagnate requires a structured understanding of readiness across operating conditions. These situations usually have little appeal. These include strategic clarity, data quality, infrastructure, governance, skills, adoption, security, and value measurement.
When leaders ignore these foundations, even well-funded AI programs can collapse into fragmented pilots, unclear accountability, and thin benefits.
If leaders ignore these foundations, even well-funded AI programs can collapse into fragmented pilots, unclear accountability, and thin returns. The corporate world remains incredibly inventive when it comes to disguising immaturity as momentum.
Companies may have access to cloud tools and AI platforms but may not yet be ready, so a robust AI readiness assessment that goes beyond technology is necessary to reach informed conclusions.
You may lack a board-approved roadmap, clear executive sponsorship, reliable and accessible data, managing explainability and bias, the right mix of talent, an organization’s willingness to adopt new ways of working, or a disciplined way to track business value.
A robust AI readiness assessment framework helps surface these gaps through weighted scoring, multidimensional assessments, and benchmark-oriented design, providing advanced metrics and insights for chief information officers and technology leaders, customized insights for executives and non-technical leaders, and frontier assessments for AI centers of excellence and innovation teams.
These step-by-step insights are important because AI readiness varies depending on who is in the room.
Boards need visibility into strategic alignment, sponsorship, governance, risk, and value. Technology leaders need evidence on architecture, machine learning operations, data lineage, scalability, and deployment discipline. Innovation teams need to understand whether they can support more advanced capabilities without the control mechanisms breaking down under pressure.
A useful preparation tool must speak to all these realities without degrading into consultant wallpaper.
This is the level that disciplinary commissions should demand in 2026, as AI has become too important to business to manage as an informal innovation stream. This should be treated as a function of the company that impacts growth, risk, operating model design, and capital allocation.
The barometer highlights the timing and need for such detailed assessments. The overall investment index rose to 69%, the highest since 2022, as leaders increased investment across core business areas.
The report also states that the adoption of AI is considered the biggest opportunity among ongoing technology transformation efforts. It creates both opportunities and dangers. Organizations that assess their readiness early will be able to act more accurately.
For boards, the practical issue separating AI theater from AI execution is simple.
- Do you have a board-backed AI roadmap that leads to clear business outcomes?
- Are your highest priority use cases tied to measurable value?
- Is our data good enough to support trustworthy AI? Can our infrastructure scale securely and cost-effectively?
- Are our governance, compliance, and security controls commensurate with the risk?
- Do you have the talent, training, and cultural readiness to incorporate AI into your operations?
- Can we demonstrate value creation and not just a technical activity?
AI readiness assessments are commercially useful when providing internal diagnostics. This gives management a structured way to test whether their confidence is backed up by operational realities.
This combination has strategic value. Readiness assessments can help shape board discussions, inform transformation plans, support vendor evaluations, create benchmarks for future progress, and identify where advisory interventions can have the greatest impact.
In an environment where AI ambition is common but AI readiness is still uneven, boards that understand the difference can govern better, invest better, and take control faster. Boards that confuse confidence with preparedness may find out rather painfully that optimism is not their operating model.
- Cooper is head of digital advisory at Forbis Mothers in South Africa.
