Artificial intelligence use has become nearly universal inside large organizations, but enterprise-level financial returns remain elusive, according to McKinsey's Global Survey on AI published by its QuantumBlack AI practice.

The survey found 78 percent of respondents say their organizations use AI in at least one business function, up from 72 percent in early 2024 and 55 percent the year before. Regular use of generative AI reached 71 percent, with marketing and sales the most commonly cited function for deployment across every sector surveyed. Organizations now apply AI in an average of three business functions.

Value capture lags adoption. More than 80 percent of respondents said their organizations are not yet seeing tangible enterprise-level earnings impact from generative AI, and only 1 percent of executives in a companion survey described their rollouts as mature. McKinsey's analysis found workflow redesign had the largest effect on bottom-line impact among 25 attributes tested, yet only 21 percent of respondents said their organizations had fundamentally redesigned workflows. Fewer than one in five reported tracking well-defined performance indicators for generative AI solutions.

McKinsey's follow-up State of AI research found 23 percent of organizations are now scaling agentic AI systems somewhere in the enterprise, with another 39 percent experimenting with AI agents. On workforce effects, 43 percent of respondents in the McKinsey survey data cited by Stanford's 2026 AI Index expect little or no change in workforce size from AI over the next year, while 32 percent anticipate decreases.

Source: McKinsey & Company -- https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights/the-state-of-ai