Executives and stakeholders are all in on AI skills. However, it’s unclear whether those skills are yielding any actual results.

Several reports published on Tuesday detailed an increasing demand for AI skills across job functions. That excitement may be intensified by a broader pressure on enterprise leaders to extract value from their massive AI investments.

Some recent findings include:

• Linkedin’s Skills on the Rise report indicates a hot demand for skills including AI literacy, prompt engineering, responsible AI and more throughout occupations. Still, while two-thirds of executives feel confident that their employees will proactively learn new AI skills over the next six months, less than half feel supported in doing so.
• KPMG’s AI Pulse Survey shows that in the technology, media and telecommunications sector, companies plan to invest an average of $156 million in AI over the next 12 months. These companies are also willing to pay more for employees with AI skills, and 62% expect to achieve measurable gains on their investments over the next year.

However, despite the exuberance, some in the industry may be starting to question the reality of these expectations. On Monday, Goldman Sachs Chief Economist Jan Hatzius said in an interview with the Atlantic Council that AI investment contributed “basically zero” to the U.S. GDP growth in 2025.

“I think there’s a lot of misreporting, actually, of the impact AI investment had on U.S. GDP growth in 2025, and it’s much smaller than is often perceived,” Hatzius said.

Still, it’s unclear whether that lack of meaningful impact will endure or if the industry is more nascent than many believe. For instance, at the India AI summit held last week in New Delhi, OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap said that AI adoption hasn’t truly taken off at scale in businesses. “We have not yet really seen enterprise AI penetrate enterprise business processes,” Lightcap said.

Our Deeper View

Whether or not these investments will have a real impact, it’s clear that many companies have FOMO, and as a result, are going all in. However, this AI skills fervor might give more companies an excuse to shed employees who lack those skills, such as what Accenture started doing last year. This is where the narrative of AI job replacement comes into play: What happens to the people who don’t have AI skills, don’t have the means to be reskilled on AI, or have jobs that can simply be automated entirely? In the end, it could still become a zero-sum game in which those with AI skills greatly benefit, while those without are left to struggle.