McKinsey
8 storiesMcKinsey is a global management consulting firm whose AI surveys are widely cited in the press. Recent coverage drew on several of its studies: its 2025 State of AI survey found 88% of organizations regularly use AI in at least one function but only 7% have scaled it fully; about 80% of respondents reported productivity gains while just 37% saw a profit impact; and separate research suggested the U.S. could create more jobs than automation displaces over the next decade.
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Get Covered COO Rick Folgmann says his firm runs 16 AI agents across 3 million-plus rental units, and the hard part was deciding who each agent reports to. He advises starting with rule-bound tasks and giving agents written rules, scope and regular review, citing Deloitte's finding that 23% of firms use agentic AI today and Gartner's forecast that over 40% of agentic projects will be canceled by end-2027.
The storage costs of back-end data from AI inference are often overlooked and grow rapidly with inference scale. WD measurements show an 8-second video with a 3.97MB output file left over 500MB of associated back-end data, a 130x increase. In an IDC survey, nearly 95% of respondents reported data volume growth due to generative AI in the past year. McKinsey projects inference demand will grow at a 35% CAGR through 2030, exceeding 40% of total data center demand.
New McKinsey research suggests the U.S. economy could create more jobs over the next decade than automation replaces, though millions of workers may need to move into new roles. Consultant Cassandra Worthy says AI anxiety is real and many familiar jobs won't exist in five years; entrepreneur Rob Price argues AI will change most jobs but not overnight, and says none of the companies his tools serve have replaced employees because of them.
McKinsey's 2025 State of AI survey found 88% of organizations regularly use AI in at least one business function, up from 78% a year earlier. The piece says applied AI now focuses on solving real problems, citing PwC data showing a 62% wage premium for AI skills and job growth nearly eight times the broader market.
Computerworld reports that in a McKinsey survey about 80% of respondents said AI improved productivity, but only 37% saw an impact on profits and just 6% said AI delivered significant value worth at least 5% of operating profit. Analysts say the biggest gains come from redesigning end-to-end human-agent workflows rather than layering agents onto existing processes, and from better transparency on token costs.
McKinsey found 88% of organizations use AI but only 7% have scaled it fully. The gap exists because companies apply AI to fragmented operations instead of redesigning processes first, according to the analysis. NBER research showed AI boosted support-agent productivity by 14% on average.
Speaking on "Improving the Economics of Agentic AI," McKinsey said unit costs for the same capability have fallen sharply while enterprise AI spending keeps climbing as agents consume far more reasoning. The same task can cost up to 30 times more from one run to another, and choices such as single versus multiple agents strongly affect cost.
Iman Abuzeid left clinical practice to found Incredible Health in 2017; the San Francisco hiring platform has raised about $97.5M, serves 1.5M healthcare professionals (including half of U.S. nurses) and 1,500 employers, and uses an approach that asks employers to apply to candidates to ease staffing shortages.
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