26 Nov The Quiet Divide in AI Adoption—and Its Impact on Global Mobility Programs

Artificial intelligence dominated this year’s HR Tech conference, but beneath the excitement lies a striking contradiction: while most professionals are experimenting with AI tools, far fewer organizations are formally integrating them into their talent, mobility, or HR systems. For global mobility professionals—who manage cross-border assignments, compliance exposure, and the employee experience across countries—this adoption gap carries major implications for 2026. AI has the potential to reshape mobility, yet institutional adoption remains uneven.

New research from Sapient Insights Group’s 28th Annual HR Systems Survey highlights this contrast clearly. Thirty-one percent of organizations now use AI within HR processes—up from 24% the previous year—yet 80% of HR professionals report using AI tools personally for work tasks, and only 14% of them pay for the tools they use. 

This indicates that AI experimentation is widespread at the individual level, while formal enterprise integration is still lagging behind. Mobility teams frequently face the same situation: individual team members may use AI to draft communications, interpret data, or summarize policies, but organizations have yet to embed AI directly into their global mobility workflows, governance structures, or assignment lifecycle processes.

A shifting definition of AI—and why it matters for mobility

The Sapient Insights survey also shows that organizations are redefining what counts as artificial intelligence. For years, machine learning and predictive analytics were seen as foundational to AI adoption—capabilities long used by mobility programs to forecast assignment costs, evaluate tax implications, or model risk.

However, across survey respondents, the threshold for defining AI has changed. Many organizations now only consider a tool to be “AI-driven” if it incorporates generative or agentic capabilities—systems that produce new content, deliver recommendations, and take autonomous steps beyond analyzing existing datasets.

This shift directly affects global mobility. The next generation of mobility and HR tech platforms will not stop at dashboards or predictive reporting. Instead, mobility professionals should expect AI tools that can:

• Draft assignment letters, offer templates, and policy summaries
  Generate customized relocation guidance for employees
• Interpret host-country tax rules in real time
  Surface compliance and immigration risks proactively
  Analyze multi-year data to help mobility teams evaluate exceptions

In short, AI within mobility is moving from analytics to actionable intelligence.

Cost is rising as the primary barrier for global adoption

Another major Sapient finding is that cost has become the top obstacle to AI implementation—especially among large global organizations with more than 5,000 employees. In this year’s survey, the number of organizations citing cost as the primary barrier jumped to 44%, up from 22% the previous year.

HR Executive’s analysis of the survey results indicates that many organizations feel priced out of the current generation of AI-enabled systems, both due to licensing fees and add-on costs for new AI features.

This is especially relevant for mobility teams managing already expensive programs—tax equalization, immigration legal fees, allowance administration, relocation vendor contracts, and travel budgets. Convincing leadership to allocate additional budget for AI capabilities becomes challenging when mobility spending is already under scrutiny.

The survey also reveals the following attitudes toward AI pricing:

• 57% of organizations do not want to pay extra for AI
• 40% will only consider it with clear ROI
• just 5% are willing to pay premium fees

For mobility, success depends on connecting AI investment to measurable improvements such as fewer compliance failures, reduced assignment exceptions, faster processing times, and stronger employee support during global moves.

Mobility’s strategic importance continues to rise

Another Sapient finding that matters for mobility: the percentage of CEOs and boards who now view HR as a strategic function increased dramatically—from 34% to 54% in one year.

This perception shift naturally extends to global mobility. As organizations expand internationally, shift toward distributed work models, and compete for global talent, mobility programs increasingly influence business strategy. AI tools that support cross-border forecasting, tax planning, immigration risk modeling, and global workforce deployment will reinforce mobility’s rising strategic profile.

Although AI dominates industry discussion, the Sapient data indicates that most organizations are still using it in pragmatic, task-based ways. According to HR Executive’s reporting, companies are primarily using AI to summarize policies, extract data from documents, answer benefits questions, and support reporting.

For mobility professionals, these capabilities translate into:

• Faster interpretation of immigration or visa rules
• Quicker production of assignment cost estimates
• Automated summaries of host-country tax regulations
• Accelerated responses to employee questions during relocations
• Streamlined consolidation of vendor or case-management data

The more transformative applications of AI—those that could meaningfully reshape mobility workflows or redesign the assignment lifecycle—are still in early stages. The survey suggests that the true potential of generative and agentic intelligence has yet to be fully realized at the enterprise level.

What this means for global mobility leaders

The insights point to several critical priorities for mobility teams preparing for 2026:

1. Move from experimentation to structured adoption. Individual AI use is high, but organizations need formal governance and mobility-specific frameworks.
2. Expect generative AI to become a standard feature. Mobility technology providers will increasingly embed agent-like capabilities directly into their platforms.
3. Prepare to justify investment through assignment outcomes. Leadership will require clear ROI tied to risk reduction, compliance improvement, and mobility efficiency.
4. Take advantage of mobility’s rising strategic position. AI strengthens analytical and forecasting abilities that support global workforce strategy.
5. Prototype before scaling. Pilot small, high-impact mobility use cases before rolling out large-scale transformation efforts.

A pivotal moment for global mobility

As mobility teams navigate immigration volatility, evolving tax rules, distributed workforces, and rising employee expectations, AI will become increasingly important for delivering consistent, compliant, and timely global support. But most organizations are still figuring out how to transition from isolated experimentation to enterprise-grade adoption.

The findings provide a roadmap: global mobility leaders who begin shaping their AI strategy now—embedding governance, piloting targeted use cases, and aligning AI with assignment lifecycle outcomes—will position their organizations for a more intelligent, resilient, and globally agile future.