LinkedIn research says half of C-suite leaders are flying blind on AI—and its CBO says they can’t fix it the way they’re trying

About halfway through a conversation with Fortune last week, Linked In chief business officer Mark Lobosco was asked a blunt question: How much of the enterprise AI adoption story is about executives who resist understanding because their jobs depend on them not understanding it? After all, they spent the vast majority of their careers in a pre-AI world where they didn’t have to plan for this unpredictable new technology. He didn’t push back. “Sometimes,” he said, “different parts of the org may be less willing to change, maybe to your point, because it’s their job not to do that.” It was an honest moment in a 40-minute conversation with the executive overseeing half of LinkedIn’s workforce—and the one his company’s own research, released this week, most clearly points toward. The survey of 1,252 C-suite leaders in the U.S., U.K., and India finds half of executives acknowledge they don’t have clear visibility into the roles and skills their organizations will need as AI matures—what LinkedIn’s report calls a “workforce blind spot.” Seventy-eight percent say they are moving faster on AI than they can effectively measure. Those numbers are striking. What Lobosco adds to them, from his weekly conversations with CMOs, CHROs, and CROs, is a more uncomfortable layer: The blind spot isn’t just about uncertainty. It’s about structure. “We’re at this place where the C-suite is navigating this moment without a real playbook they can rely on,” he told Fortune. That’s pretty well known by now, but what the survey quietly surfaces is the standard response to that problem, the top-down mandate to transform, may be making things worse. This moment really calls for good “change management,” Lobosco said, and that “doesn’t work if it’s top down. It doesn’t work if you’re not bringing everyone along on the journey.” Transform