AI skills gap: how to find and close it in your organisation

Closing the AI skills gap starts with knowing where your organisation stands, then mapping the skills each role needs. At aiblLIVE London 2026, Professor Nisreen Ameen of Henley Business School shared what the SKAI Programme, built with Skills England and DWP, found works.

Her research drew on 23 workshops with around 150 organisations and a survey of 536. The room then placed their own organisations on an AI skills adoption pathway. This guide turns that session into a method you can run.

SKAI Programme research in numbers

• 70% of UK workers are in jobs exposed to AI, according to Skills England’s latest report.
• Almost a third of organisations surveyed are still at the exploration stage.
• 2% of organisations surveyed are at the scaling stage.
• 1% have reached safe, confident, role-based AI use at scale.

All figures as stated in the workshop by Professor Nisreen Ameen.

How do you find your organisation’s AI skills gap?

Place your organisation on the pathway, then map skills by category and job level. The SKAI framework uses three categories: technical, responsible and ethical, and non-technical, each across entry, mid and managerial roles. In the survey, the biggest gaps were technical skills, followed by responsible and ethical skills.

How do you design AI training that lasts?

Test it against the PRIMES principles: practical, reachable, integrated, modular, expandable and sustainable. Employers worried that training bought today could date within two to six months. The survey found training most often lacked flexibility and accessibility, a skills framework, and practical, contextualised content set in real work.

What do organisations that get AI upskilling right do differently?

They start from business problems, not tools, and invest over years. Professor Ameen pointed to peer learning, a clear leadership message and AI learning linked to progression. KPMG told staff its internal training was not optional. Airbus records each person’s AI learning and links it to promotion, and reported gaining 4 hours a week.

The worst thing a leader can do is to not talk about AI.

Nisreen Ameen, Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Policy, Henley Business School

Key takeaways

• Know your stage. Agree where you sit on the pathway, team by team.
• Map skills by category and level. Technical skills are weakest.
• Test training against PRIMES. Drop anything that will date in months.
• Name an owner for safe use. In sensitive work, appoint an AI safety officer.

About the workshop

Professor Nisreen Ameen is Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Policy at Henley Business School, University of Reading. She has spent two and a half years working with Skills England, DWP and DfE on AI skills for the UK workforce. She ran this workshop on the Workforce track at aiblLIVE London on 20 October 2026.

What’s in the full guide

If you are about to buy or build AI training, run this first. The full guide gives you the research, the method and the tools to apply it.

• A seven-step method to find and close the gaps.
• The adoption pathway and skills framework, with what the survey found at each stage.
• What successful organisations did, from KPMG and Airbus to reverse mentoring.
• Three starter templates and a checklist to run before you commission training.

For HR, learning and business leaders planning AI training. Seven pages, about a nine-minute read.