麦肯锡称企业 AI 终于"走上 ROI 之路

ai and ml

Fasten your seatbelt and empty that bladder: AI investment is rising, but reported enterprise earnings impact remains stubbornly flat

MOST POPULAR

Anthropic asks users to stop being mean to Claude; '123456' password linked to Denmark data breach affecting 8.8M people; Intel optimizes IPv6 networking into nothingness, say users; When you just need to build a tiny desktop app: TinyJS; No shame in the Domain Name game: DNS is doomed, literally

Four years into the generative AI revolution, consulting giant McKinsey reckons we've finally started the engine and are officially "on the road to ROI." Whether that road leads to actual profit-making and how long it takes to travel is anyone's guess, because the firm's data suggests most respondents still aren't reporting an enterprise-level earnings contribution from AI.

McKinsey surveyed 1,719 professionals and business leaders from around the world and across industries for its report on the State of AI in 2026, and what it found sounds a lot like what similar studies have determined in the past couple of years. According to the report, more businesses are deploying more AI in the belief that their investments will start paying off, but the number of people reporting an actual earnings boost from their AI initiatives has remained flat.

According to the survey data, 37 percent of respondents “attribute at least some EBIT [earnings before interest and taxes] impact to AI use,” which is “about the same” share as respondents to its 2025 survey. The word "some" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there, because only a small minority of respondents qualify as McKinsey’s AI high performers.

McKinsey considers AI high performers to be respondents who attribute at least 5 percent of their organizations’ EBIT to AI use and describe the technology’s impact as “significant.” The number of high performers has remained flat since last year - just 6 percent of survey respondents met both criteria.

Despite the face-slapping reality of hard-to-find benefits, companies are plowing ahead with their AI investments - at least for now.

“Organizations’ conviction in AI is growing faster than the immediate financial returns they can attribute to it,” McKinsey said. “More expect AI to reshape their business over the next three years than did a year ago, and they continue to plan to invest more.”

Once you sink your tech budget into all that Kool-Aid, it’s hard to put the powder back in the pack, it seems.

Agentic AI use is up, says McKinsey, with 40 percent of respondents at organizations with more than $1 billion in annual revenue saying they’re scaling AI agents, compared to 27 percent last year. Coding agents are also on the rise, with nearly a third of respondents saying their organizations decided against buying one or more software products or features in favor of building the functionality in-house with agentic coding tools. Hopefully those firms have set aside a budget to bring in developers to fix the issues AI-generated code can introduce, too.

McKinsey also found that, while a majority of organizations plan to increase their AI investments, many are butting up against the fact that it’s really expensive, with 20 percent of respondents saying AI-related operating costs have constrained their use of the technology.

All of that set aside, 80 percent of respondents who use AI in their roles said the technology has improved their individual productivity, even as those gains have yet to translate into broad financial impact for organizations.

What do respondents expect AI to mean for headcount? Well, more cuts, apparently. While 43 percent of respondents still expect little or no AI-related change in total employment, an increasing number (39 percent this year compared to 32 percent in 2025) expect their employer to cut jobs thanks to AI in the coming year. Like the belief that AI is eventually going to pay for itself, that might not be reflected in reality either, if McKinsey’s prior year data is anything to go on.

According to the consulting outfit, workforce reductions in 2025 “fell well short of what respondents in last year’s survey had anticipated,” suggesting that turning to AI to replace humans isn’t a sure bet, which we could have told you without you having to pay McKinsey big bucks to suss that out.

So, where does that leave the future of AI in the enterprise? Pretty much in the same place as it was before: A huge money sink that has yet to prove it’s worth the cash businesses are dumping into it. Individual productivity boosts thanks to the automation of soul-crushing busywork may help employees feel better, but that’s not measurably beneficial to a business’ bottom line.

As to when McKinsey thinks organization-wide AI benefits reported by respondents, like increased employee and customer satisfaction, “improvements in innovation,” and competitive differentiation, might actually lead to returns on those ever-increasing investments in tools provided by big AI, that wasn’t mentioned in the report. We asked the firm what its experts think, but didn’t hear back.

For now, AI ROI remains in the same place as fusion power, fully autonomous driving, and practical quantum computers: Forever a few years away from reality and in dire need of more capital.

McKinsey has been in touch since publication to qualify what it meant by the business world being on the road to AI ROI.

"Some ROI is already being achieved, and we expect more over time," report coauthor and McKinsey Quantum Black senior fellow Michael Chui told us in an email. "It’s a journey, not a destination."

Chui explained that the "high performers" mentioned in the report are seeing "real ROI," but he believes it takes organizational change to make that happen, not just plugging in AI tools and hoping for the best. Chui also said we shouldn't be surprised it's taken several years for AI to begin showing even the smallest bit of ROI for the biggest businesses.

"It should not be surprising that it has taken time, because it is a reflection of trends we’ve seen with other technologies," Chui explained. "History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes." ®

Updated at 1903 with a statement from McKinsey.

Fire up that iPhone 1 emulation and party like it's 2007

Browser-based fun to remember a time before Apple's annual cash grab became a thing

New motherboards, old RAM, plenty of life left in yesterday's PCs

DDR4 makes a comeback as component costs rise, while Linux offers an escape from forced upgrades

The VMware exit is a protection upgrade

PARTNER CONTENT: VergeIO says an exit is also an opportunity

Tiny11 puts Windows 11 on a diet without the PowerShell workout

New desktop app simplifies stripping out bundled software, with heavier cuts carrying security and support risks

It won't kill you, or humanity, to get off the AI upgrade treadmill

New models arrive so fast, we already have more new tech than it's possible to understand in a career

Cisco, Nvidia team up to build fatter, faster pluggable

If you thought 1.6 Tbps was fast, just wait, Cisco's USFP targets 12.8 Tbps in a single optical pluggable

TOP STORIES

Anthropic asks users to stop being mean to Claude; '123456' password linked to Denmark data breach affecting 8.8M people; Microsoft and Anthropic play invoice tennis with startup's $17,600 Claude bill; Starlink's plan to avoid orbital near-misses: Ephemeris sharing; Shai-Hulud worm makes jump to AI infrastructure with Tensorlake compromise; Dutch tax office ditches Microsoft 365 cloud for on-premises alternative

Cisco, Nvidia team up to build fatter, faster pluggable If you thought 1.6 Tbps was fast, just wait, Cisco's USFP targets 12.8 Tbps in a single optical pluggable; Claude submitted fake murder tip to Philly police during summertime testing Anthropic took more than two months to alert cops; AI systems are fully capable of carrying out nightmare attacks against infrastructure and nobody's ready Meanwhile, AI agents move robotic arms, 'make OT device operator screens lie'; Nvidia found $1B under the couch to help secure American scientific computing dominance Commitment comes as GPUzilla prepares to fortify Uncle Sam's arsenal with at least seven AI-optimized supers; TSMC taps GlobalFoundries to bolster US silicon interposer production in $2B deal Advanced packaging tech is essential to the domestic production of high-performance semiconductors used in AI datacenters

Infosec

Security Russians are posing as Signal support to launch phishing attacks PLUS: US takes down Iranian propaganda sites; Marketing company asks 'Why Do We Have Your Information?' And more!; Security Microsoft patches failed to fix on-prem SharePoint, which is now under zero-day attack PLUS: China upgrades smartphone surveillance tools; Ring eases anti-snooping stance; and more; Black Hat and DEF CON DEF CON Franklin project enlists hackers to harden critical infrastructure Voting village reports have been so successful, says Jeff Moss, that the whole of DEF CON will now be included; Security EQT buys majority share in Swiss cybersecurity biz Acronis Went at equivalent of $3.5B+ valuation for entire firm, though portion sold not specified; Malware Month Ten years since the first corp ransomware, Mikko Hyppönen sees no end in sight On the plus side, infosec's a good bet for a long, stable career

FOSS

NetBSD may have found a new role: The AI-free FOSS OS Increasing awareness and adoption, followed by increasing donations; OpenAI dots inspire open source imitators amid technical difficulties Persistent agents appeal to AI companies, but demand isn't obvious; Ubuntu 'Stonking Stingray' beta swims out: Deeper Rust 'oxidization' plus LLM speech-to-text GNOME 51 is here, and Ubuntu interim releases are getting interesting again; Revive Raskin's 3 laws of software with humane work that considers a dev's duty of care All this, and angry NeoVim users; Firefox 157: Could bold new look be just what Mozilla needs?* Yet another new version of Firefox, with a significant reskin; KDE turns 30 and someone's brought an AI-native desktop proposal Akademy talk imagines Plasma assembling itself around a personal model of each user