Shane Cooper, Head of Digital Advisory at Forvis Mazars warns that the reported 94% executive confidence in AI preparedness may be dangerously misleading. He argues that AI has moved from corporate experimentation to the centre of boardroom strategy, and boards must move beyond executive sentiment to demand a robust, structured AI readiness assessment. This assessment must rigorously test foundational operating conditions, such as strategic clarity, data quality, governance, and security, to ensure AI initiatives deliver measurable business value rather than collapsing into fragmented, expensive, and uncontrolled pilots.
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According to the latest Forvis Mazars C-suite barometer, business leaders headed into 2026 with a striking combination of confidence and caution – 92% of executives surveyed had a positive outlook on growth for their organisation.
Based on findings, artificial intelligence (AI) emerged as the external trend most likely to affect business over the next 12 months, cited by 40% of respondents. At the same time, transforming company IT and technology ranks as the top strategic priority for the next three to five years at 39%.
AI readiness lags
Taken together, those findings tell a clear story: AI has moved from the edge of corporate experimentation into the centre of strategy. It now sits alongside growth, competitiveness and transformation as a core boardroom issue.
The barometer makes the wider context equally clear. Leaders are operating in an environment shaped by economic pressure, increased competition, regulatory demands and persistent uncertainty, even as they continue to invest for growth.
That combination of optimism and instability is where the real governance challenge begins. Enthusiasm for AI is widespread, but readiness to use it well is far less certain.
The barometer hints at this tension. For the first time, it measures confidence in AI readiness separately and reports that 94% of executives believe their organisation is prepared for AI.
Yet, the same report notes weaker confidence on talent-related issues and stresses that leaders need to intervene strategically to harness AI responsibly. It also highlights data security as a crucial investment area within the broader technology transition.
Delivering measurable business value
Given the factors at play, boards need to ask a harder question than whether the business is embracing AI. The real issue is whether the organisation is prepared to deploy AI safely, responsibly and in a way that produces measurable business value.
A serious answer requires more than executive sentiment. It requires a structured view of readiness across the operating conditions that determine whether AI initiatives scale or stall.
Those conditions usually have little glamour attached to them. They include strategic clarity, data quality, infrastructure, governance, skills, adoption, security and value measurement.
If leaders ignore those foundations, even well-funded AI programmes can collapse into fragmented pilots, unclear accountability and thin returns. The corporate world remains remarkably inventive when it comes to dressing up immaturity as momentum.
Assessing AI readiness
Arriving at an informed conclusion requires a robust AI readiness assessment that looks beyond the technology, because a business may have access to cloud tools and AI platforms and still be unprepared.
It may lack a board-approved roadmap, clear executive sponsorship, reliable and accessible data, controls for explainability and bias, the right talent mix, the organisational willingness to adopt new ways of working, or a disciplined method for tracking business value.
A robust AI readiness assessment framework can help surface those gaps through weighted scoring, multi-dimensional evaluation and benchmarking-oriented design, delivering tailored insights for executives and non-technical leaders, alongside advanced metrics and insights for CIOs and technical leaders, and a frontier assessment for AI Centres of Excellence and innovation teams.
These tiered insights matter, because AI readiness looks different depending on who is in the room.
Boards need visibility into strategic alignment, sponsorship, governance, risk and value. Technology leaders need evidence on architecture, MLOps, data lineage, scalability and deployment discipline. Innovation teams need to understand whether more advanced capability can be supported without control mechanisms fraying under pressure.
A useful readiness instrument must speak to all these realities without degenerating into consultant wallpaper.
Unlocking enterprise-wide capabilities
As such, this is the level of discipline boards should demand in 2026, because AI has become too material to the business to be governed as an informal innovation stream. It needs to be treated as an enterprise capability with implications for growth, risk, operating model design and capital allocation.
The barometer reinforces the timing and need for such in-depth assessments. The overall investment index has risen to 69%, its highest point since 2022, with leaders increasing investment across core business areas.
The report also states that AI implementation is seen as the greatest opportunity within ongoing technology transformation efforts.
That creates both opportunity and danger. Organisations that assess readiness early can move with more precision. They can prioritise the right use cases, align governance earlier, direct investment more intelligently, and avoid wasting energy on scattered initiatives.
Organisations that skip this discipline usually drift toward one of two outcomes: they move too slowly and lose ground, or they move too quickly and create activity without control. Neither path is attractive. One concedes advantage. The other manufactures expensive confusion.
For boards, the practical questions that separate AI theatre from AI execution are straightforward:
An internal diagnostics tool
This is where AI readiness assessments become commercially useful, providing the internal diagnostic. It gives leadership teams a structured way to test whether executive confidence is supported by operational reality.
That combination has strategic value. A readiness assessment can help shape board discussions, inform transformation planning, support vendor evaluation, create a benchmark for future progress, and identify where advisory intervention is likely to have the greatest impact.
In an environment where AI ambition is common, but AI readiness remains uneven, boards that understand the difference will govern better, invest better and move faster with control. Boards that confuse confidence with preparedness may discover, rather painfully, that optimism is not an operating model.
(Cooper is Head of Digital Advisory at Forvis Mazars in South Africa. His views do not necessarily represent those of the Sunday Tribune or IOL)
Shane Cooper, Head of Digital Advisory at Forvis Mazars in South Africa
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