The companies pulling ahead in artificial intelligence are not separated from the rest mainly by their technology — their widest advantages are about people, according to Diana David, ServiceNow's director of futures.

David, who calls herself a "forward-deployed futurist," said CEOs kept asking her for "forward-deployed" employees — "people to be out on the edge, to bring us back the insights about what is actually happening in AI in our companies." What she is finding from that vantage point is that talent, training, and operational discipline, rather than tools alone, set the leaders apart.

Speaking Thursday at the Fortune AIQ Summit, David told moderator Jeremy Kahn, Fortune's AI editor, that talent investment is the largest divide in ServiceNow's Enterprise AI Maturity Index, a 100-point benchmark the company began in 2024. "Talent investment. That was the biggest gap," she said. According to the index, 57% of "pacesetters" invest in ongoing AI upskilling, versus 4% of other organizations. The single widest gap is in attracting, hiring, and retaining AI talent: 68% vs. 10% — a spread that, on her reading, makes people rather than platforms the dividing line between leaders and the rest.

"It's really operational discipline, right?" David said. "It's not just technology—operational discipline and transformation."

Pacesetters are the roughly 21% of surveyed organizations that scored above 60 on the 100-point index, averaging 74 against 45 for everyone else. Their edge extends beyond talent. By David's account, 64% are on a path to unified data, versus 14%, and around 57% have "a clear, strong AI vision," versus 21%.

Autonomous workflows show a similar split. About 59% of companies surveyed are past the pilot phase, David said, but "only 9% are doing agentic, autonomous, multistep workflows that are not checked by human beings at every step." Among pacesetters the share is 36%, against 2% of others. These workflows are "not just one little point of sale," she added. By the survey's own math, more than nine in ten organizations sit outside that autonomous bracket.

That distinction drives what David called her "pet peeve": "AI adoption for everyone."

"I get it, because it's a great CEO story," she said. "95% of everybody has X, Y, Z. But it is not translating into productivity, and it's often not with training, and that doesn't equal maturity."

Kahn had set up the problem. Many companies gave employees AI tools and "let a thousand flowers bloom," he said, then concluded the approach was too expensive and produced no productivity gain, and are now narrowing to specific use cases. He also pointed to companies that dropped agents into existing workflows, or swapped an employee for one.

David said the answer starts higher up. "I think it starts with leadership," she said. "Growth mindset, an idea, and a vision for change of what the company can become, followed with specific training around AI and specific functions."

She urged executives to think "almost in a day zero mentality" about which processes they would design from scratch. The alternative, she said, is to "sprinkle AI on something, probably a very old or broken process, to make it go even faster. That's just not solving the problem faster."

Kahn pressed on a worry he said executives voice: the technology moves so fast that a redesigned process may be obsolete next year. David said she hears that, too. Her answer is to have a vision, align the data, choose workflows, assign ownership, and "iterate … I don't think that any company is going to succeed by doing some kind of top-down plan where one person or one strategy team is redesigning everything immediately," she said.

She pointed to ServiceNow's AI Control Tower as one way to see across an organization. "You have to have transparency," she said. "Having the visibility from across the organization and a very strong foundation allows you to be flexible."

Most companies remain behind on the human side. According to the report, 59% of organizations lack long-term HR plans for AI, and 42% of employees say they aren't getting enough AI training — figures leave the bulk of the market on the other side of the training divide David described. The report puts pacesetters' average ROI at 160%.

The leaders are not confined to tech. David said technology companies took about one in five spots on Fortune's AIQ 75, followed by financial services. Construction and engineering took six, and food and health care five each. "It is everything, everywhere, all at once," she said.

The index itself has been volatile. "In 2024 we started this, and we thought, 'It's just going to go up and up and up,'" David said. Instead, the average score fell from 44 to 35 — a drop Kahn noted came "several years into the generative AI boom." David attributed it to a gap between hype and results: "the noise was out there, AI was everywhere, but it hadn't really filtered into company value." Scores rebounded to 51 this year.

"I can't promise you that there won't be another dip next year," she said.

David added that ServiceNow plans to add agentic AI to the AIQ next year. The measure will turn on "what are we deploying and where," and on whether companies are "realizing actual commercial value." That, she said, "is what I think true maturity for business is going to mean, versus everybody has, you know, AI in their pocket." Next year's AIQ will be the first to grade organizations on that standard, offering the next read on whether the people gap she described is narrowing.

For this story, Fortune journalists used generative AI as a research tool, and an editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing. This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.