McKinsey's State of AI research places AI usage in at least one business function at 78 percent of organizations, up from 55 percent two years earlier. The measured financial return trails that adoption curve by a wide margin.

Just 39 percent of surveyed organizations attribute any EBIT impact to AI to date. Fewer than one in ten enterprises can identify a generative AI deployment delivering measurable, sustained business value at scale. A concentrated group of roughly 6 percent, which McKinsey labels AI high performers, captures a disproportionate share of the value created across the sample.

Agentic systems show the same pattern at an earlier stage. McKinsey found 23 percent of organizations already scaling an agentic deployment, with another 39 percent running experiments. Separate forecasting has projected that more than 40 percent of agentic AI projects will be cancelled by 2027, with unclear return and weak governance cited as the leading causes.

The underlying survey covered more than 10,000 senior leaders across 16 countries and 17 industries, fielded between June and September 2025.

The spread between the 78 percent usage figure and the 39 percent EBIT attribution figure defines the current state of enterprise AI. Deployment has become routine. Attribution of financial outcome to those deployments has not.

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