McKinsey's State of AI research finds that adoption has outpaced measurable financial return. While 88 percent of respondents say their organizations regularly use AI in at least one function and 72 percent report using generative AI, up from 33 percent in 2024, just 39 percent report enterprise-level EBIT impact from the technology.

A small group captures outsized value. AI high performers, roughly 6 percent of respondents, attribute more than 5 percent of enterprise earnings before interest and taxes to AI. The distinguishing factor is not tooling but process change. High performers are about 2.8 times more likely to report fundamental workflow redesign, at 55 percent versus 20 percent of other organizations.

Scaling remains the barrier. Nearly two-thirds of respondents say their organizations have not yet begun scaling AI across the enterprise. Fewer than one-third follow most of the recommended adoption and scaling practices, and fewer than one in five track key performance indicators for their generative AI solutions.

Agentic systems are moving from experiment to early production. Twenty-three percent of respondents report scaling an agentic AI system somewhere in their organization, and another 39 percent say they have begun experimenting with AI agents. The research concludes that technical deployment alone does not capture value, and that organizations willing to redesign how work flows are the ones seeing returns.

Source: McKinsey - https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights/the-state-of-ai-how-organizations-are-rewiring-to-capture-value