An ADAPTOVATE AI Research Report
The Execution Gap: Where Ambition Outpaces Action in the AI Era
Conducted by Wakefield Research
Surveying 300 C-suite executives on AI transformation readiness
Clarity without capacity. That is the condition the C-suite
is navigating in AI transformation right now.
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The gap is not strategic. It is structural.
The 300 executives surveyed have already made the case for AI. What they are navigating is the distance between a strategy that is settled and an organization that has not yet been built to execute it. The bottleneck is the capacity to act on that knowledge, and it is proving remarkably consistent across every company size, every geography, and every level of felt urgency.
say their own job security depends on scaling AI, a full 22 points higher than those who see company-level risk
know exactly what their organization needs to do – while only 22% have the organizational capacity to act on it
are concerned their most promising AI pilots are not being scaled broadly across the organization
have hired change consultants already. Only 20% say those strategies were effectively implemented
Four sections.One consistent pattern.
The research traces the execution gap across four distinct dimensions: where the personal stakes sit, where momentum breaks down, where the talent constraint is forming, and why change initiatives consistently fail to absorb. Each section produces its own set of findings. They point at the same underlying condition.
Executives are their own canary in the coal mine
Executives are more certain about the danger to themselves than the danger to the company they run. The accountability has arrived before the capability, and the personal alarm sounds first, every time.
Where it stalls
The pilots are working. They are just not spreading. The distance between a pilot that runs and one that delivers comes down to whether the organization built the surrounding conditions to support it.
Talent is a bottleneck
Of 300 executives surveyed, not one has solved the talent side of this problem. The barriers they are naming are organizational, not technological, and the talent gap has a shelf life that makes the strategic uncertainty harder still.
Why change doesn't stick
In most organizations, champions are not appointed – they emerge. The conditions that make change stick are rarely built with intention. That is not a model; it is a fortunate sequence of events most organizations are hoping will repeat itself.
Research Partner
Wakefield Research, an independent firm commissioned by ADAPTOVATE
Sample
300 C-suite executives across the US and Canada, organizations with $10M+ annual revenue
Fielded
May 28 – June 8, 2026, via online survey with quotas set by country and company size
Download the full report
The complete report includes the full findings across all four sections, sub-group analysis by company size and geography, and ADAPTOVATE's view on what closes the gap. Execution is the strategy – and the research shows exactly where organizations need to start building toward it.