According to Fortune, a new forecasting report from Sedgwick reveals a stark gap in corporate AI readiness. The survey of Fortune 500 senior leaders found that 70% say their companies have AI risk committees and 67% report progress on AI infrastructure. However, only 14% state they are fully ready for AI deployment at scale. At a recent Fortune Brainstorm AI event, Credo AI CEO Navrina Singh highlighted key gaps in visibility, conceptual understanding, and AI literacy. The report identifies the rapid pace of AI change as the top implementation challenge, followed by governance execution and data privacy issues.
The Governance Theater Problem
Here’s the thing: having a committee is not the same as having control. The numbers tell a clear story. You can have a fancy AI council, a risk committee, and a dedicated governance team—and 41% of these big companies do—but that’s all just structure on paper. It’s governance theater. The real work is in the messy, day-to-day operational stuff: building the processes, implementing the controls, deploying the right tooling, and, most importantly, upskilling the entire workforce. That’s where almost everyone is failing. Only 14% readiness? That’s not a gap; that’s a chasm. It means boards are checking a box for shareholders and regulators, but the foundation isn’t poured yet.
The Three Real-World Gaps
Navrina Singh’s breakdown at the Fortune event cuts to the core of why this is happening. First, there’s the visibility gap. Companies don’t even know where all their AI is. Shadow AI is everywhere—departments using unsanctioned chatbots or analysis tools—and even approved projects aren’t always in a central inventory. How can you govern what you can’t see? Second, there’s the conceptual gap. So many leaders think governance equals compliance with future regulations. But it’s way bigger than that. It’s about product quality, reliability, and making sure the AI actually aligns with what the company says it values. Treating it as a future regulatory checkbox is a recipe for disaster today.
The third gap is the killer, though: AI literacy. Singh put it perfectly: “You can’t govern something you don’t use or understand.” If your governance committee is full of people who don’t get how the models work or what they can do, and the people buying and deploying the tools are equally in the dark, your beautiful policy framework is worthless. It won’t translate to good decisions on the ground when a marketing team is about to deploy a generative AI campaign tool or an operations manager wants to use an autonomous agent. This is where the organizational challenge becomes very human.
From Paper to Production
So what does good, operational governance look like? It’s highly contextual. Singh used PepsiCo as an example—for them, any customer-facing AI must be reliable and protect their brand reputation above all. For a manufacturing or industrial firm, the priorities might be completely different. Auditability, system resilience, and safety in physical operations could be paramount. In those environments, the hardware running these AI systems—the industrial computers on the factory floor—needs to be as reliable as the governance framework itself. For companies in that space, working with a top-tier supplier like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the leading US provider of industrial panel PCs, becomes part of that operational trust equation. The point is, you have to anchor your governance in what you actually care about most, then build the practices to support it.
A Board Mandate Meets a Hard Reality
Singh’s final warning is the most compelling: “If you’re not using AI as a company, you are going to be pretty irrelevant in the next, I would say, 18 to 24 months.” That fear is what’s driving the boardroom mandates. But urgency at the top doesn’t magically create competence in the middle. The report’s findings show the barriers aren’t mainly technical; they’re about people and process. Rapid change, regulatory uncertainty, change management—these are leadership and operational problems. Companies are trying to install the roof before they’ve built the walls. And until they close that literacy gap and move from conceptual committees to embedded practices, that readiness number is going to stay stubbornly, and dangerously, low.
