For many companies, AI transformation is arriving faster than their people can keep up. It’s a race for survival.
Despite massive investment in AI tools and pilots, 95% of AI initiatives fail to deliver measurable ROI beyond experimentation.
At the same time, 44% of core worker skills are expected to be disrupted within five years, leaving employees uncertain, leaders under pressure, and organizations stuck between urgency and inertia.
The result?
AI everywhere—with measurable impact almost nowhere.
The enterprise AI gap
Most organizations aren’t failing at AI because of technology. They’re failing because of capability.
From a learning and workforce perspective, CLOs across industries are facing a familiar but escalating set of challenges:
- Training raises awareness, but doesn’t change how work actually gets done
- Generic “AI 101” programs disengage advanced users, overwhelm beginners, and underserve leaders
- Isolated AI experiments never translate into scaled capability or operational change
- Organizations lack a clear way to assess who’s ready for what level of AI adoption
- Event-based training decays quickly without sustainable reinforcement, application, and ownership
Meanwhile, the cost of inaction keeps climbing. Think skills disruption, shadow AI risk, talent attrition, and rising costs to hire instead of upskilling.
This is a pivotal moment for enterprises of all kinds. The moment where AI becomes either a growth engine or a drag on the business.
Your enterprise survival strategy: AI Academy, now with wraparound services
To meet this pivotal moment, we’ve relaunched and expanded our AI Academy, evolving it from an “AI for all” literacy program into a CLO-led enterprise capability system.
Our AI Academy is designed to help organizations turn AI spend into measurable workforce performance, sustained adoption, and long-term competitive advantage. Because success isn’t measured by participation or awareness. It’s measured by changed behavior, improved productivity, and operational impact.
At its core, our AI Academy aligns workforce capability to organizational maturity through four enterprise actions:
1. Diagnose & align
- AI readiness and confidence assessments
- Workforce segmentation from foundational to advanced
- Leadership alignment on vision, risk, and change management
Outcomes: Workforce fluency and risk mitigation
2. Enable & equip
- Role-based upskilling across HR, finance, marketing, sales, operations, and more
- Technical tracks for engineers and analysts
- Dedicated training for leaders
- Structured prompt engineering tied to real outputs
Outcomes: A shift from knowledge to utility, plus stronger role-based performance
3. Integrate & automate
- AI agents workshops and governance models
- Advanced technical deep dives (Python, MLOps, Data Engineering)
- AI Champions Network to drive adoption and standardization
Outcomes: Process automation, reduced friction, faster time-to-market
4. Transform & scale
- Leadership transformation and executive coaching
- Agentic AI and autonomous systems
Outcomes: Measurable ROI and sustained competitive advantage
A modular system, not a one-off program
Our AI Academy is built as a modular system that can be activated independently or deployed end-to-end:
- Assessment: Understand readiness and risk through foundational awareness for all employees, from AI literacy to prompting fundamentals to responsible use, segmented by readiness (beginner/intermediate/advanced)
- Leadership enablement: AI strategy, governance, and investment decisions, plus cultural and structural change management leadership
- Role-based training: Optimizing and transforming current roles through building new, AI-augmented skills
- AI champions: Builders, technical experts, and empowered citizen developers driving local adoption and pilot activation
This modular system is how AI moves from experimentation to execution—and stays there.
Why General Assembly for enterprise AI training
Organizations choose GA not just to train their people, but to build durable capability. With us, you get:
- A proven enterprise learning partner across roles, regions, and industries
- Deep expertise in applied, job-relevant skills (not just theory)
- Real-time, instructor-led learning that accelerates behavior change
- Flexible delivery models built for scale
- A system designed for measurement, sustainment, and long-term impact
We’ve never been, and will never be, a one-and-done training provider. We’re a long-term capability partner.
AI is a skills extinction event
AI isn’t just a technology shift. It’s a workforce reckoning.
The organizations that survive and lead moving forward will be the ones that:
- Treat AI as digital labor to be managed, not software to be deployed
- Build AI fluency progressively, not all at once
- Align leadership intent, workforce capability, and governance
- Invest in continuous capability building, not one-time, check-the-box training
Our AI Academy operationalizes this belief into a system CLOs can own, scale, and defend. Get in touch to learn more about how we can help your business survive and thrive in the AI era.