McKinsey: The State of AI in 2026

By McKinsey & Company · 2026.

Dan Tinkoff and Lieven Van der Veken, global leaders of QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey, present the results of the latest McKinsey Global Survey on the state of AI in organizations.

According to the survey, companies are scaling AI across the entire organization, deploying it in more business functions and using tools ranging from chatbots to coding agents and agentic systems capable of acting autonomously across entire workflows.

Employees already see benefits at the individual level: eight in ten respondents say AI has improved their personal productivity. However, the financial impact at the enterprise level has not kept pace: only 37% of respondents say AI has contributed to their organization's EBIT, a figure virtually unchanged from the previous year.

The email highlights that what sets "AI high performers" apart is how they put the technology into practice, succeeding in translating adoption into measurable impact.

The full research, linked from the email under the title "Turn AI adoption into enterprise value", covers, according to the message itself, coding agents and other agentic AI tools, investment and associated costs, workforce implications, and the practices that can help turn momentum around AI into lasting enterprise value.

In addition to the main article, the email includes two further pieces. The first is an invitation to join McKinsey's Global Survey Panel, an online community of 28,000 executives worldwide who for more than 20 years have contributed their perspectives to research published in McKinsey Quarterly and in reports such as the annual State of AI; participants receive early access to survey results. The second is an invitation to a "McKinsey Live" event on October 15, in which Michael Chui and Roger Roberts will discuss the "Technology Trends Outlook 2026" report live, exploring where technological momentum is building, how the main trends are converging, and what they mean for business leaders, workers and society.

The email does not give any further detail on methodology (exact sample size, countries surveyed or specific data collection dates) beyond what is mentioned above.