The Single Biggest Barrier to AI Adoption Isn't the Technology — It's This | Errol Gardner of EY

Errol Gardner has spent 35 years advising the world's largest organizations through major technology transitions, and his assessment of where enterprise agentic AI actually stands is one of the most grounded you'll hear anywhere. His number: less than 1 out of 10 on a maturity scale. Not because the technology isn't ready, but because deploying agentic AI across an organization doesn't tweak how it works, it requires rebuilding how it works. And that is a fundamentally different kind of challenge than anything the AI hype cycle is currently acknowledging.

In this conversation with Craig Smith, Gardner walks through why cloud adoption still hasn't reached 7 out of 10, what that means for agentic AI timelines, why the single biggest barrier to adoption is human resistance rather than technical limitation, and why governments will ultimately have to step in to manage workforce displacement at scale. He also raises a question that almost nobody is asking: is the value exchange between the technology sector and traditional industries sustainable in the long run? It's a conversation that doesn't just describe where AI is, it explains why the gap between the narrative and the reality has never been wider.

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