Cisco AI Readiness Index 2024: Hype Meets Reality

TL;DR

The second annual readiness benchmark by Cisco, released on 19 November 2024. It scores organisations on six “pillars” and sorts them into four groups.

1. 13% are “Pacesetters” (score 86 or higher), down from 14% in 2023. Chasers 33%, Followers 51%, Laggards 3% (p. 5; 2023 split 14 / 34 / 48 / 4, p. 20).
2. The fall is within Cisco’s own margin. The report states sampling error of about 1 point at 95% confidence and says only “any difference of 2% or more” is a true change (p. 24). The headline drop is 1 point.
3. The score is a weighted readiness score, not an outcome. 49 indicators, six pillars weighted Strategy 15%, Infrastructure 25%, Data 20%, Governance 15%, Talent 15%, Culture 10% (p. 5, p. 24).
4. Urgency is high, results lag. 98% feel more urgency than a year ago and 85% say they have 18 months or less to show impact (press release). Nearly 50% saw no gains or gains below expectations, and 38% have clearly defined impact metrics (p. 4).
5. Netherlands: 7% Pacesetters. The Dutch country edition shows 7% Pacesetters, 15% Chasers, 73% Followers and 5% Laggards (country edition, p. 2 chart). Its sample size is not stated.

Key data

Measure	2024	2023	Page
Pacesetters (score ≥ 86)	13%	14%	p. 5, p. 20
Chasers (61–85)	33%	34%	p. 5, p. 20
Followers (31–60)	51%	48%	p. 5, p. 20
Laggards (≤ 30)	3%	4%	p. 5, p. 20
Average score: Pacesetters / Chasers / Followers / Laggards	93 / 72 / 48 / 25	—	p. 5
Pacesetters by pillar: Strategy / Infrastructure / Data / Governance / Talent / Culture	28 / 15 / 13 / 16 / 16 / 9%	—	p. 5
Boards “receptive” to AI	66%	82%	p. 3
Need more data-centre GPUs for future AI workloads	79%	76%	p. 9
Pacesetters by size: 500–1,000 / 1,000–1,500 / largest employers	11 / 16 / 13%	—	p. 21
Pacesetters by revenue: US$500M–1B / over US$1B	24 / 16%	—	p. 21
Pacesetters by sector: technology services / financial services / retail / business services	20 / 16 / 13 / 12%	—	pp. 20–21
Netherlands: Pacesetters / Chasers / Followers / Laggards	7 / 15 / 73 / 5%	—	NL edition p. 2

Health care is one of the surveyed industries (p. 24), but the report gives no health-care breakdown.

Method and definitions

• Sample. 7,985 “senior business leaders with responsibility for AI integration and deployment at organizations with 500 or more employees”, in 30 markets, including the Netherlands (p. 24). Double-blind online interviews by an independent firm that is not named, fielded August–September 2024 (p. 24).
• Score. Each of 49 indicators is scored by deployment: full deployment 100%, partial deployment 25–50% (p. 24). Indicators carry weights “based on its relative importance to achieving readiness”; pillar scores are weighted into an overall score with the pillar weights above (p. 24). The 49 indicators and their individual weights are not published.
• What “fully ready” means. A Pacesetter is an organisation whose weighted readiness score is 86 or more. The press release calls them “fully ready to capture AI’s potential”. The groups are bands on a readiness score, not measures of value achieved.
• Sponsor. Cisco sells networking, security and data-centre infrastructure. Infrastructure carries the largest pillar weight (25%).

Scope and reliability

• Vendor survey, self-report. Respondents rate their own organisation’s deployment. Cisco designs the index and has a commercial interest in infrastructure findings.
• Change within the margin. The 14% → 13% “decline” in the headline is smaller than the 2-point threshold the report sets for a true change (p. 24).
• Internal inconsistencies. The report says “Among the 20 sectors analyzed” (p. 20) but lists 18 industries (p. 24). Cisco’s archive web page gives the fieldwork as September–October 2024 (model-extracted), the PDF August–September 2024 (p. 24).
• Country editions reuse the global text and add country charts. The Netherlands edition gives no Dutch sample size, so the 7% cannot be given a margin.

Dynamic-capabilities reading

• digital-sensing/digital-scouting: an annual cross-country scan of how prepared firms say they are, by pillar, sector, size and market.
• digital-transforming/improving-digital-maturity: the index is a maturity-style instrument, a weighted score with four bands, and compares bands year on year.
• contextual/internal-barriers: the report’s own list of what holds readiness back is talent shortages, cybersecurity risk, long technology lead times, data silos and data spread across jurisdictions (p. 4). Board receptiveness fell from 82% to 66% (p. 3).

How it connects

• 2026-04-28-mittri-cisco-ai-enabled-enterprise: the MIT Technology Review Insights report, sponsored by Cisco and created in August 2025, reprints this index’s 13%, 98%, 85% and 50% figures with the credit “Compiled by MIT Technology Review Insights, based on data from Cisco, 2025”. The wiki’s thread calls that figure “Cisco’s 2025 readiness survey”. The numbers match this November 2024 edition.
• 2025-10-14-cisco-ai-readiness-index-2025: the next edition keeps the same four groups and thresholds and again finds about 13% Pacesetters.
• ai-maturity-measurement-comparison and enterprise-ai-adoption: Cisco’s 13% is one of the bars in the thread’s cross-walk. This page supplies the scoring rule behind it.

What was actually ingested

The full 25-page global PDF (pp. 1–25; TOC ends at “About the Research”, p. 24), the Netherlands country edition (13 pages), and the press release. cisco.com refuses curl requests (HTTP 403). The PDFs were retrieved with the WebFetch tool and converted locally. Raw files: raw/reports/2024-11-19-cisco-ai-readiness-index-2024.md, raw/reports/2024-11-19-cisco-ai-readiness-index-2024-netherlands.md, raw/articles/2024-11-19-cisco-press-2024-ai-readiness-index-urgency-rises-readiness-falls.md.

Linked entities and concepts

Entities: Cisco, MIT Technology Review Insights.

Concepts and threads: enterprise-ai-adoption, ai-maturity-measurement-comparison.

Dangling (single-source mention, deferred): Jeetu Patel (Cisco chief product officer, quoted in the press release; also quoted on 2026-04-28-mittri-cisco-ai-enabled-enterprise).