McKinsey: AI boosts individual productivity, but enterprise ROI remains elusive
The state of AI in 2026: On the road to ROI
McKinsey's 2026 global survey reveals a widening gap between individual and enterprise AI impact. While 80% of respondents report AI improving their personal productivity, the share of organizations seeing EBIT impact from AI has stalled at 37%. Large enterprises are scaling agentic AI rapidly, and nearly a third are forgoing software purchases in favor of building with coding agents. Yet AI-related costs now constrain usage for one in five organizations, and expectations of AI-driven workforce declines are rising.
The share of respondents reporting that AI has contributed to their organizations’ EBIT is essentially unchanged from a year ago, at 37 percent.
- ivolimmen
> Organizations are using agentic coding tools to build software in-house in lieu of purchasing it. Nearly a third of respondents (32 percent) report that their organizations have decided against buying one or more software products or features because they could be built internally with agentic coding tools.
People think they can do it themself... kind of like how everyone build their own database using Microsoft Access in the 90's. When all software developers needed to repair all the issues...
- mjhay
The ROÍ will be happening any day now, we promise. Please hire more McKinsey consultants who say they’re AI experts.
- dgellow
Do I understand correctly that means there is no AI ROI to show off yet? If correct that’s pretty bad, no?
- zerolayers
This McKinsey? https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-a...
- theptip
> About four in ten respondents (37 percent) report that AI has contributed positively to their organizations’ EBIT, essentially unchanged from 2025—despite growth in the share of organizations scaling AI technologies. But respondents do cite other organization-wide benefits: most notably, improvements in innovation, competitive differentiation, customer satisfaction, and employee satisfaction.
I view this mostly as a case of uneven diffusion. Consider your priors on the tech savviness of the bottom 50% of enterprises, let alone the bottom 25%. Many companies won’t adopt AI for 5 years. Now model how a 5% difference in growth plays out; not enough to sink stragglers immediately.
The other interesting bit is a 5% increase in EBIT could be a smaller productivity increase in the margin, eg you lowered prices by 2% and some fraction of your competitors’ customers noticed.
Basically, nothing revolutionary but I think it’s an error to read this as “we don’t see ROI yet”.
The other interesting point is one of legibility; the difference between “employees using AI” and “business function has rolled out AI”.
> Among AI tools, chatbots are the most widely scaled, with 47 percent of respondents saying their organizations are scaling them across the enterprise
We should look into the details, but I read this as: ~everyone is using AI ad-hoc, the 47% is the consultant-y “leadership has stood up a measurable initiative to scale AI…”. By construction, Gartner cannot measure the on-the-groun […]