Why aren't organizations investing in reskilling despite AI job displacement fears?

Capgemini's Research Institute, drawing on its survey of 1,500 director-level-and-above leaders across 14 countries, reports that "61% of organizations report rising employee anxiety about the impact of AI agents on their employment prospects, and over half believe AI agents will displace more jobs than they create." The notable second half of the finding is organizational response: "Despite this, fewer organizations are prioritizing reskilling or workforce restructuring."

Capgemini places this alongside its broader framing that agentic AI marks "a new era in enterprise productivity, efficiency, and growth," evolving agents "from tools to team members." The anxiety and displacement-belief figures come from the same leaders making that productivity case, which means the organizations expecting the most value from agentic AI are, by their own report, also the ones not yet investing in the workforce transition that belief implies. Capgemini does not state a causal mechanism connecting the belief to the inaction — the report presents the gap descriptively rather than explaining why leaders who foresee net job displacement are deprioritizing reskilling.

This is a sibling finding to Why is enterprise trust in autonomous AI agents declining?, drawn from the same survey instrument: both describe enterprise sentiment about agentic AI souring even as deployment plans continue, one on trust in autonomy and the other on workforce impact and preparedness. It also qualifies Why are companies deploying agents faster than governance matures? — where Deloitte's gap is between deployment plans and governance maturity, Capgemini's is between leaders' own belief that agents will displace jobs and their failure to act on reskilling, suggesting the "plan now, build the supporting structure later" pattern recurs across workforce preparation as well as oversight.

The excerpt does not give the comparison baseline for "rising" anxiety (rising relative to what prior measurement, over what period), nor a count of how many organizations were already reskilling before this wave, so the size of the shortfall cannot be quantified beyond "fewer." Capgemini is a professional-services firm with its own workforce-transformation and reskilling consulting offerings, giving it a commercial stake in documenting exactly this kind of unaddressed gap; the finding is best read as self-reported leader sentiment about their own organizations, not an independently audited measure of actual reskilling spend or job displacement.