UK firms embrace AI but managers lack skills, CMI warns

TL;DR:

• A Chartered Management Institute survey of more than 1,000 UK managers found 70% report some productivity gain from AI, but only 5% call it transformational and 26% see none at all.
• Two-thirds of organisations remain stuck in testing or early pilots, even as half expect to be “AI future-ready” within a year.
• Just 12% of managers feel very confident leading AI-enabled teams, dropping to 10% for agentic systems.

Britain’s ambition to lead the world in artificial intelligence could founder not on the technology but on the people meant to deploy it. New research from the Chartered Management Institute argues that a shortage of managers able to turn AI investment into productivity is the binding constraint, and its survey of over 1,000 UK managers shows why.

Investment outpacing capability

The numbers describe a familiar gap between spend and result. While 70% of managers report some productivity improvement, only one in twenty describes the gains as transformational, and a quarter have seen nothing. Some 68% of organisations are still running experiments or early-stage pilots — yet 52% somehow believe they will be AI-ready within twelve months.

Leadership is part of the problem. Senior managers encourage experimentation (64% do), but only 13% of staff strongly agree those same leaders actually use the tools themselves. Confidence is thin throughout: 12% feel very confident managing AI-enabled teams, falling to 10% for more autonomous agentic systems. “AI adoption is not just a technical challenge, it is a management challenge,” said Jacky Wright, chair of the CMI’s AI Advisory Council and a former McKinsey technology chief.

The findings echo recent UK evidence that the bottleneck sits with people and process rather than models — from enterprise pilots stalling before scale to the government’s £200m push to get businesses actually using AI. Tellingly, 70% of managers now turn to generative tools for workplace advice, often finding them faster than their own organisations.

Looking forward

The CMI frames AI rollout as a change-management programme, not a software purchase — one demanding investment in leadership and governance, not just licences. For UK firms, that reframing is the practical takeaway: the productivity dividend ministers keep promising depends less on buying the latest model than on managers confident enough to lead with it.