The Journal's CIO Journal covered the Wharton-GBK Year Four findings in its Morning Download, leading on a training gap that depends entirely on who you ask: managers and above are considerably more likely to say employees are adequately trained than entry- and mid-level employees are to agree.
Mindspan Labs founder Jeremy Korst told the Journal the gap matters because the middle of the organization is "where the work gets done." Those mid-level managers and directors are the people now being asked to rethink workflows and operate across organizational boundaries — usually without extra time or budget.
The way we see it, a disagreement that large about whether training happened is not a measurement problem. It is the perception difference that shows up whenever readiness is assessed from above rather than from the work. Leadership sees a programme that was delivered; the people doing the work see a programme that did not change what their day requires. Both reports are honest, and only one of them predicts whether AI gets used on anything consequential.
This is Core, and it is the ring the others depend on. A gap here caps what strategic clarity and governance can deliver downstream, because the work still has to be done by the layer that does not believe it is ready.
So what: Ask the question twice, at two levels, and treat the difference as the finding. If your managers and your front line disagree about training, the programme is not the thing to fix first — the design of the work is.
This piece ran in CIO Journal's Morning Download newsletter, which has no public permalink.