Cisco's CEO survey shows a rush to modernize tech, but one HR expert says it's time to rethink where that investment goes
CEOs are worried they're getting left behind. According to a new Cisco survey of 2,500 chief executives across 23 countries, nearly two thirds fear their businesses are underinvesting in AI.
For Anna Tavis, chair of the Human Capital Management Department at NYU's School of Professional Studies in New York, that widespread worry depends entirely on what "underinvesting" actually means.
"The question needs to be broken down into two parts," Tavis said. "Investing in bringing in new tools and systems, and investing in transitioning people and their skills. I think transitioning people, their skills, is actually a much bigger and more important investment that needs to happen with this kind of AI transformation."
Why AI infrastructure keeps winning the budget fight
That's not where the money is going, though. Infrastructure modernization topped CEOs' list of technology priorities for 2026, with 40% of respondents naming it their top concern, ahead of upskilling their teams for AI workloads. Tavis said that emphasis on infrastructure over upskilling traces back to how the market rewards executives, particularly in the U.S.
"The market in the way it operates in this late stage capitalism in this country rewards infrastructure investment, but not investing in people," she said. "In fact, layoffs are the signal to the market that they're downsizing, they're becoming efficient. Which is often the opposite of what's actually going on."
Tavis cautioned against reading the survey's aggregate numbers as a single, uniform story. She said the pace of AI adoption, and what companies choose to prioritize within it, varies significantly by industry and even by the personal commitments of individual CEOs.
"I think we're going to see a different pace at which they're going to be progressing in their AI adoption journey," she said. "I think we need to be a little bit more discerning around what industry they represent. The industry really defines how much, and in what particular areas of AI adoption, they're prioritizing."
As an example, Tavis pointed to how some large consulting firms have approached the shift differently. She described one government-focused consultancy whose chief learning officer received a mandate to retrain the majority of its consultants within two weeks of ChatGPT's public release.
"He literally described like a 24/7 treadmill, how he was redesigning the programs, bringing the technologies in and getting them retrained," Tavis said. "I don't think that in every industry there's the same level of urgency, but the most important investment is letting people learn to do their jobs very differently with the help of these agents and assistants."
Not every company has taken that path, though. Some have let restructuring decisions get driven by tech teams rather than workforce strategy, leaving HR out of decisions it's often best positioned to inform.
HR's case for investing in people
Tavis said HR leaders who want to shift executive attention toward people need to lead by example and bring a business case, not just a training plan. That case for putting HR at the helm of AI-driven workforce strategy is gaining traction elsewhere too, with a similar argument that treating AI purely as a cost-cutting tool overlooks the bigger opportunity in building durable skills.
"HR people are really partners to the CEO to help them understand," she said. "It's not going to be training sessions. It's going to be really giving people those tools, assuring them that they're not just training tools to replace themselves."
Measuring the return on that investment is often assumed to be difficult, given how new AI adoption still is.
"I think part of the challenge is that analytics isn't the primary skill set for HR," Tavis said. "Oftentimes they're trying to make the human case, but they can't really quantify it. But there are lots of really compelling examples and very quantified, identifiable benefits."
HR teams shouldn't assume a benefit is unmeasurable just because it looks intangible at first, she said. Increasingly, larger companies have internal data teams they can partner with to help build the business case.
The CHRO role keeps expanding
Looking ahead, Tavis expects HR's role to grow alongside AI adoption, converging in some ways with IT rather than competing with it.
"There's going to be more and more convergence of HR and IT," she said. "I'm not saying that HR replaces IT or IT replaces HR. It's going to be a convergence skill set, where people will need to understand human behavior, cognitive function, decision making, and how those tools are going to be enhancing and assisting individuals."
That blurring of lines is already showing up elsewhere. The hidden cost of calling your AI agent an employee found that once managers start treating AI as a coworker rather than a tool, they review its output less carefully.
Recent Census Bureau data on business AI adoption shows usage climbing fastest among the largest firms. Whether those same companies close the parallel gap in people investment may determine how much of that technology spending actually pays off. A BCG report on designing human oversight into AI systems makes a similar point: oversight has to be built deliberately into how work gets done, not assigned after the fact.
Tavis said how quickly organizations adapt will come down to whether they treat the shift as an opportunity or a threat.
"I think the right people are going to get on with the movement," she said. "It is really a movement. Those who continue to resist and protect what they know, it's unfortunate. This is where it's really important to create an innovation environment where people are not afraid to experiment, to change, and step out of their silos."
