AI has reached a point where adoption is no longer the headline. Nearly nine in ten organizations now report regular AI use in at least one business function, according to McKinsey's latest global survey, while 44% say AI is scaling across their enterprise. The acceleration has been striking, but the financial returns have been slower to follow: only 37% of respondents reported a positive impact on EBIT.
The gap becomes sharper at the employee level. Eighty percent of respondents in the same McKinsey survey reported that AI had improved their individual productivity, while only about half said it had helped their organizations make better decisions. Mid-level managers and individual contributors also reported AI-related strains more often than executives and senior managers, suggesting that the experience of AI adoption can vary considerably depending on where someone sits inside an organization.
