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Genpact is betting that a 100% AI Practitioner workforce by 2027 lives or dies on middle managers, not training programs. CHRO Piyush Mehta argues the core barrier is confidence rather than capability, citing HFS research across Global 2000 companies. Genpact employees logged 12.5 million learning hours in 2025, with roughly 40% directed at AI and technology through its Genome platform. The plan centers on managers who actively use tools like Scout, the company’s enterprise AI assistant, to model adoption behavior and create psychological safety for experimentation.
What this means for your business
The organizations most exposed to this dynamic are the ones that have already spent heavily on AI awareness programs and are now wondering why adoption is flat. If your employee survey shows people know what generative AI is but aren’t using it in their daily workflows, the bottleneck almost certainly sits at the manager layer, not in the technology itself. Genpact’s framing names that precisely, and it maps onto a pattern that shows up repeatedly in large-scale enterprise transformation efforts.
The insight that deserves scrutiny is the causal claim buried in Mehta’s argument: that manager behavior drives employee adoption more than formal training does. That’s a defensible position, but Genpact is also a company whose commercial model depends on selling AI-enabled services to clients, so there’s a natural pull toward framing workforce transformation as something that can be systematized and exported. The emphasis on agentic operations and named internal tools reads partly as proof-of-concept marketing. The underlying logic about manager modeling still holds regardless, but the 2027 deadline and the 100% figure are targets, not baselines, and HR leaders should weigh them accordingly.
The harder structural point Mehta raises is the one most organizations are actively avoiding. Coaching has always been treated as a soft leadership attribute; AI is forcing it into the job description as an operational requirement. If your current performance management system rewards managers for output and doesn’t measure how effectively they develop AI fluency on their teams, you’re not getting the behavior you need regardless of how much you spend on learning platforms. The renewal to scrutinize isn’t your LMS contract. It’s the criteria sitting inside your manager promotion rubric.
Concept deep-dive: Agentic Operations
Agentic operations describes a model where software agents, think autonomous programs that can plan and execute multi-step tasks without a human approving each action, handle repeatable work end to end. The analogy is a capable junior employee who can be briefed once and trusted to complete the task. For managers, this changes the job from overseeing task completion to setting judgment boundaries, reviewing exception cases, and deciding which decisions still require a human. That governance role is what Genpact is trying to build into its manager development programs.
Based on reporting from Genpact targets 100% AI-ready workforce by 2027. Managers are central to the plan: CHRO, originally published 2026-06-28 03:00:00.
