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Companies are rapidly moving artificial intelligence from experimentation to enterprise-wide deployment, but the financial payoff from those investments remains limited, highlighting a growing gap between AIs impact on individual workers and its contribution to corporate earnings, according to a research report by McKinsey.
Nearly nine in 10 respondents to McKinseys 2026 Global Survey on AI said their organisations regularly use AI in at least one business function, while the share reporting enterprise-wide scaling rose to 44 per cent from 38 per cent a year earlier. The use of AI across three or more business functions also increased to 56 per cent from 51 per cent. However, the broader adoption has yet to translate into a significant improvement in enterprise-level financial returns. Just 37 per cent of respondents said AI had contributed positively to their organisations EBIT, broadly unchanged from 2025. Meanwhile, only 6 per cent qualified as AI high performers, meaning they attributed at least 5 per cent of EBIT to AI and described its impact as significant. The contrast is sharper at the employee level. Eighty percent of respondents said AI had improved their productivity, while half said it helped them make better decisions. McKinsey said the challenge for businesses is therefore shifting from encouraging individual AI use to redesigning workflows so those productivity gains translate into measurable financial results. The report suggests that companies generating the strongest returns are taking a fundamentally different approach. AI high performers are more likely to pursue growth and innovation alongside efficiency, while nearly three-quarters have fundamentally redesigned workflows around AI, compared with only about one-quarter of other respondents. They are also 3.3 times more likely to intend to use AI to fundamentally transform their businesses over the next three years. The report indicated that the next phase of AI adoption will be less about adding more tools and more about organisational transformation. Companies will need to redesign end-to-end workflows, measure financial impact, manage AI-related costs and ensure senior leadership commitment if rising AI investment is to produce sustained returns. (ANI)
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