Good morning. Companies are spending more on AI, and employees overwhelmingly say the technology makes them more productive. So far, those gains aren’t translating into operating profit for most companies.
Nearly nine in 10 respondents say their organizations regularly use AI for at least one business function, and 44% say they are scaling it enterprise-wide, according to a McKinsey survey of 1,719 professionals and business leaders globally. Eighty percent say AI has improved their individual productivity, and half say it helps them make better decisions.
But just 37% say AI is having a meaningful impact on earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT), unchanged from a year ago.
AI is also taking up a larger share of corporate budgets. Twenty-eight percent of respondents say AI now accounts for more than 10% of their IT budget, and 60% expect to increase AI investment next year. Twenty percent say AI-related operating costs, including token costs, are already constraining their use of the technology.
The companies reporting the largest financial gains offer one clue about where that spending pays off.
What McKinsey calls “AI high performers,” the 6% of organizations that attribute at least 5% of EBIT to AI, are far more likely to redesign workflows rather than add AI to existing processes. Nearly three-quarters have fundamentally redesigned workflows, up from 55% last year.
Company size also shows up in the results. Fifty-four percent of organizations with more than $1 billion in revenue report scaling AI enterprise-wide, compared with a third of smaller firms. Among large companies, the share scaling AI agents in at least one function rose from 27% to 40% in a year, while the share among smaller companies remained at 22%.
For finance chiefs weighing another year of higher AI spending, McKinsey’s findings suggest that increasing the investment is the easy part. The next AI budget may be as much a workflow budget as a technology budget.
Sheryl Estrada
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