McKinsey's annual global AI survey has become one of the standard benchmarks for enterprise adoption trends, and its 2026 edition captures a familiar but sharpening tension: adoption keeps climbing while financial returns lag behind it. Generative AI use among respondents jumped from 33 percent in 2024 to 72 percent in 2026, and 88 percent of organizations now report using AI in at least one business function.
Despite that growth, only 37 percent of respondents can attribute any EBIT impact to their AI investment, a figure essentially unchanged from the prior year. McKinsey attributes much of the gap to nearly two-thirds of organizations still stuck in scattered pilots rather than enterprise-wide deployment, with governance and risk concerns cited as the leading barrier to scaling further.