McKinsey's QuantumBlack unit published its annual State of AI global survey, finding that 88% of respondents said their organizations are regularly using AI in at least one business function, up from 78% a year earlier. The survey, fielded from June 25 to July 29, 2025, drew responses from 1,993 participants across 105 countries. Despite the high adoption rate, McKinsey found that most companies remain in early experimentation or piloting stages rather than enterprise-wide deployment, with about one-third of organizations reporting they have begun scaling AI across the business.

Interest in AI agents, systems capable of planning and executing multi-step tasks, is rising but scaling remains limited. Sixty-two percent of respondents said their organizations are at least experimenting with agents, and 23% report scaling an agentic system somewhere in the enterprise, but no more than 10% report scaling agents within any single business function.

The survey's central finding centers on financial impact: only 39% of respondents attribute any enterprise-level earnings impact to AI, and most of those report an effect below 5% of EBIT. McKinsey classified just 6% of respondents as AI high performers, defined as those reporting an EBIT impact of 5% or more alongside significant organizational value from AI. These high performers were roughly three times more likely than others to say their organizations had fundamentally redesigned workflows around AI rather than layering the technology onto existing processes, and about three-quarters of high performers report their AI programs have reached the scaling phase, compared with one-third of other organizations surveyed.

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