Revealed: Skill of the Year 2026

From learning quickly to seeing ahead

Last year, our research highlighted the ability to learn quickly as a foundational driver of success, helping people stay ahead as technology, roles, and business models shifted. Learning quickly mattered because organizations were moving toward skills-based models, where agility, upskilling, and reskilling allowed people to keep up with constant transformation.

Adaptive foresight takes that foundation and extends it: instead of only responding to new information, people scan for signals earlier, connect dots across technology, people, and processes, and translate those insights into timely decisions. This reflects the critical shifts HR leaders must navigate to balance innovation with intention as AI reshapes how work gets done.

What adaptive foresight looks like

Adaptive foresight is about seeing what is coming and acting before disruption hits. This means helping people move from “What do I need to learn now?” to “What will matter next, and how best do we prepare for it?”​

For individual contributors it builds confidence to act amid ambiguity and strengthens career resilience as roles evolve. For managers, it enables them to build teams that can cope with disruption and problem-solve effectively. For leaders, it powers strategic agility, aligning people, data, and innovation so unseen hurdles can be overcome more quickly.

Why it matters in an AI-driven 2026

AI has raised the stakes on fairness, transparency, and trust, and only around one in three employees are truly AI-ready today, revealing a readiness gap that can slow or stall transformation if organizations do not address it.​

In 2026, organizations will face a dual challenge: accelerating AI, automation, and data initiatives while managing tighter budgets, skills gaps, and workforce uncertainty. Adaptive foresight will enable people to use AI as a thinking partner, reimagining how work gets done before external pressure forces a response.​

The role of upskilling, reskilling, and AI readiness

HR must be central to overcoming these challenges, leading skills-based talent management backed by robust skills data, and building the learning capacity and adaptability that underpin both last year’s “learn quickly” and this year’s focus on adaptive foresight.​

AI readiness sits alongside adaptive foresight as a core enabler. When organizations measure AI readiness and build targeted development plans, they create the conditions for adaptive foresight to flourish—because people have both the confidence and the capability to work with AI, not around it.

How to start building adaptive foresight

Developing adaptive foresight does not require a wholesale reset; it starts with small, deliberate habits. Practical steps include:​ 

• Future-scanning: building routines and habits to track industry news, internal data, and customer shifts, asking ‘what might this mean in 6 months?’
• Piloting new ideas: testing ideas quickly with small experiments that have low risk, using results to guide bigger decisions, rather than going ‘all-in’ on a transformation initiative that is based on guesswork
• Thinking holistically: connecting insights across disciplines like operations, tech and culture that may seem unrelated but can create more informed, impactful decisions
• Continuous optimization: using project retrospectives to update assumptions and use learnings to inform the next move
• Using AI as a partner: selecting responsible AI partners to ‘think’ alongside so different scenarios can be planned and analyzed faster, while ensuring human judgment is kept firmly in the loop

Why this will differentiate top performers

Organizations that nurture Adaptive Foresight will move from reactive change management to proactive opportunity creation. Those that do not risk spending the next few years perpetually catching up to competitors who have already seen the wave coming and started building the path forward.

See how you can measure AI readiness of your workforce and start building a team that have the foresight to adapt, upskill, and thrive in the future workplace.