In a moderated discussion with Joe Kornik, senior director of editorial programs at Protiviti, a series of experts and top executives from the consulting firm revealed the biggest concerns on executives’ minds heading into 2026, during a lunchtime panel in New York City. The talent issue persists as a major concern, Kornik said, citing the survey, ranking fifth among long-term risk themes and remaining one of the long-standing issues executives expect to navigate through 2035. However, the current era of shortages is unique. Fran Maxwell, Protiviti’s global CHRO team and people and change leader, noted this pervasive skills challenge is “more prevalent now than it has ever been in the past,” impacting “almost every job and every resource” rather than being confined mainly to IT functions, as previous technology shifts were.

Mark Beasley, professor and director at North Carolina State University’s Poole College of Management, who has been affiliated with the Protiviti survey for 14 years, highlighted this profound shift in the required skill set. “I have to say AI is way different in the sense of it is now replacing the job,” he said. “Whereas the others [big technological advances] were not job replacements as much as enhancers.”

This displacement forces a change in human capability, as the focus is no longer on execution. The required skill set is shifting from whether workers can do certain tasks to thinking more strategically: “Knowledge is sort of now free in some ways. Thinking now has to really kick in.” Beasley added it’s a very different problem for organizations and colleges to solve. “We need to start thinking strategically. How can we create strategic thinkers, critical thinkers?”

This realization has led to deep concern among academic and corporate leaders about the intellectual foundations of the future workforce. When asked by Fortune if he was worried about a “thinking gap,” Beasley replied: “Yes. As a university professor, yes, I am.”

The expertise vacuum: AI replaces the path to critical thought

The trouble has to do with the significant threat AI poses to the foundational mechanism by which corporations cultivate expertise. Traditionally, in professional industries like finance or law, new hires developed deep industry knowledge by performing repetitive, basic tasks—the “grunt work”—that AI is now automating.

To combat this structural problem, Maxwell argued organizations will have to—somehow—fundamentally change how they operate and manage human capital.

The immediate operational challenge, he said, is “HR functions and organizations are going to have to redesign jobs. That’s not necessarily a muscle that most functions have.” This will be crucial for filling the ranks of those new, early-career professionals whose traditional tasks have been impacted the most. Maxwell emphasized the necessity of looking ahead to avoid future stagnation: “What’s the impact two, three years down the road if you have no early-career professionals in your organization?”

The immediate talent priority is upskilling the existing workforce to manage AI and acquire specialized knowledge. He said the current organizational focus is, “How do we upscale or prepare our workforce to take advantage of this AI initiative?” driven partly by the realization hiring externally for these niche skills can be very expensive. He said HR leaders must get operationally efficient at figuring out what skills you have in your organization, what skills you need, and how to grow the skills you require moving forward.

The result is a looming void in the management structure. Julia Coronado, president and founder of MacroPolicy Perspectives and a director on the board of Robert Half, encapsulated the developmental dilemma facing organizations: “If AI is sort of replacing the entry-level typical positions, and I need people sort of in the middle, how do I prepare the future middle if I don’t give them that ability at the base?” This creates a severe challenge for maintaining quality control and oversight in the future, as expertise is still needed to check outputs and manage and optimize AI tools.

Beasley summed up the magnitude of this organizational challenge by asking more hypothetical questions: “How do I get that new middle-level person three years from now? How do you get that graduate to that middle level? That path is far from clear for many industries.”

Resilience amid interconnected risks

Despite the complexity of the talent challenge and other headwinds—including cyber (the top global near-term risk) and third-party risks (second)—executives said they were choosing “confident action” over fear. Sameer Ansari, global CISO solutions leader at Protiviti, spoke out to say that these risks are intertwined. “We’re seeing greater operational risks inherent with AI, AI bias, model degradation, security-related topics, [a] lack of resources that actually understand how to take advantage of AI.” In other words, cyber risks are bad enough on their own, but they could be turbocharged by AI tools. To Ansari’s point, OpenAI revealed on Dec. 10, almost simultaneously with the Protiviti survey, that the cyber capabilities of its frontier models were accelerating quickly and posed a high risk.

Coronado said she sees companies exhibiting resilience, realizing economic volatility is no longer a reason “to not take action.” In many ways, things just haven’t been as bad as people feared, she said. Going back to last year, she said, there were “policy shocks all over the place. Businesses were just like, ‘What’s gonna happen next?’ There was just tremendous uncertainty.”

She added that last December, executives were reflecting on having just come out of yet another tremendously uncertain period in the pandemic. Uncertainty has simply become “a way of life” that businesses must navigate, she said, and “in a lot of ways, this year was not as bad as expected.”

Although the economy is the fifth-highest-ranked for near-term risk, Beasley said the biggest danger is simply “just not doing anything.”

“Organizations, the biggest risk organizations face is just being stagnant,” he said.

The dominance of cyber and third-party risk underscores the compounding danger of rapid, unchecked AI adoption. Beasley highlighted the exponential nature of this vulnerability when systems are interconnected: “I don’t know how that third party’s using AI. So it sort of quickly becomes exponentially a concern.”

Looking long-term, competition and customer dynamics are the No. 1 concern, followed by security/privacy and AI deployment. Noting declining immigration and birth rates, Coronado stressed that globally, growth is now solely reliant on human ingenuity: “All of growth is going to be driven by competitive advantage, market share, innovation. That’s the only driver of growth now.” This makes the critical thinking gap—the ability to innovate strategically—the most formidable hurdle. But just how capable are people of truly thinking critically, every day on the job?

The path forward requires deliberate strategy and human-centered design. Coronado advises that amid technological upheaval and uncertainty, leaders must “know who you are. Know what your values are. Who are you as a company?” Establishing and maintaining this identity and focus on the customer is “really important grounding in this environment.”

Maxwell was direct in his message to leaders: “You can’t solve today’s talent problems with yesterday’s talent.” New solutions, like proactive job redesign and sophisticated upskilling programs, are nonnegotiable.

Kim Bozzella, global CIO solutions and technology consulting leader at Protiviti, sounded a note of optimism when she said that some organizations are finding surprise results with AI. “They are finding that the younger generations are probably more nimble with AI.”

Maxwell agreed, saying that some of the training takes the form of younger generations training and upskilling the older population and creating more cohesion in organizations, not necessarily a generational divide.

Still, in response to another question from Fortune at the luncheon, Maxwell was forthright about this moment of transition, compared with everything he’s seen during decades in top-level consulting. The skills gap between talent and AI is “more prevalent now than it has ever been in the past,” he said, noting previous skills shortages didn’t happen “at this macro of a level.” Previous tech revolutions exposed skills gaps, to be sure, but those “didn’t spill out into the parts of the business, where this is spilling out to every part of the business.”