Your biggest skills gap is your fifth priority

Ask HR and L&D leaders to name their most critical skills gap, and one answer comes back more than any other. 53% say AI literacy.

Now ask them where their learning investment is actually tied. Closing skill gaps for AI adoption lands fifth out of six organizational priorities. Manager and leadership effectiveness takes the top spot. Employee engagement and compliance follow.

That contradiction sits at the center of the 2027 Skills Intelligence Report, built by Docebo, 365Talents, and Brandon Hall Group from a survey of more than 1,000 HR and L&D leaders across Europe and North America.

It isn't a visibility problem

The easy explanation would be that organizations don't know where they stand. The data says otherwise.

• 96% say role-specific skill requirements are defined across their organization.
• 93% say skills data is accessible to both HR and L&D when making learning decisions.
• 75% say their organization is well prepared to reskill or upskill employees.

Leaders can name the gap. They can see the data. And still, the gap they name first gets funded near last.

Where the money goes instead

Two-thirds of leaders say AI tooling investment grew at the same pace as, or faster than, their learning and enablement budget over the past year. For 7%, the learning budget was cut directly to pay for the tools.

When HR or L&D teams ask for more headcount to close the gaps they've identified, 47% say the biggest barrier is budget redirected to other priorities, AI tools among them.

The spend goes to the thing people need to learn, not to the learning.

The real barrier: everything else on the list

When leaders name the single biggest barrier to an effective skills strategy, 45% say conflicting priorities. That's more than double any other answer, ahead of not having the right tool (25%) and governance (21%).

The report's argument is that overfunded tooling is a symptom. Without a unified skills strategy, nothing forces anyone to weigh tool spend against training spend before the money is committed. AI literacy is simply the most visible case today. The same pattern will repeat with the next critical gap.

What's inside the report

The 2027 Skills Intelligence Report goes beyond the diagnosis:

• Four chapters on groundwork, investment, C-suite ownership, and the skills blueprint, each with a practical solution.
• A six-step framework for building a skills strategy that holds, from securing sponsorship to tracking impact in stages.
• Perspectives from 11 practitioners, analysts, and academics, including Brandon Hall Group, Everest Group, PwC Canada, and Merck.
• Three customer stories: how Veolia keeps 15,800 skills current across three languages, how Alstom deployed to 55,000 employees in nine weeks, and how Infinite Campus found 27 internal candidates for hard-to-fill director roles.
• Four questions to benchmark where your own team stands this week.

If your organization already knows its biggest gap, the next question is why it isn't funded yet. The report is a good place to start.