The state of AI in 2026: On the road to ROI

mjhay

The ROÍ will be happening any day now, we promise. Please hire more McKinsey consultants who say they’re AI experts.

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...

lukewarm707

i look forward to mckinsey being replaced by ai.

dgellow

Do I understand correctly that means there is no AI ROI to show off yet? If correct that’s pretty bad, no?

simianwords

As expected the thread is filled with smug comments on how it is definitely not ROI positive. The thing I think about is AI is already at that spot where you don’t need a survey or a Randomised Controlled Trial to prove it makes one productive. Sometimes things are that obvious. But these kind of tests and surveys appeal to a certain kind of person who considers IMO the wrong type of things as rigorous.

zerolayers

This McKinsey? https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-a...

kittikitti

I wouldn't trust anything McKinsey publishes.

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-ground adoption.

VCFundedGenYer

"AGI next <week/month/year/decade>, promise" (Statement has been made since 2022)

fittingopposite

Since when are these reports behind registration forms?