Employees report AI productivity gains. Most companies can't find them in operating profit.
In McKinsey's 2026 survey, 80 percent of respondents say AI improved their productivity. Only 37 percent attribute any EBIT impact to it.
AI Adoption
How organizations move AI from pilots into daily work: role and workflow redesign, skills, governance and measured returns.
Companies abandoning most AI projects rose from 17 to 42 percent in a year
S&P Global found that 42 percent of companies had abandoned most of their AI initiatives before production, up from 17 percent a year earlier, in a survey fielded in late 2024.
Frontline AI users save a workday a week. Two-thirds get little guidance on using it.
BCG's 2026 AI at Work survey finds 42 percent of regular frontline users, non-managerial office staff in its definition, save at least a full workday a week. Sixty-six percent say they get limited or no guidance on what to do with that time.
AI's hardest problems are people problems. Change budgets say otherwise.
BCG's 2024 survey attributes about 70 percent of AI implementation challenges to people and process. Monitor Deloitte's 2025 study finds change management and communications get an average of 9 percent of transformation budgets.
CEOs say AI depends on adoption. They estimate a quarter of staff use it.
In IBM's 2026 CEO Study, 83 percent of chief executives said AI success depends more on people's adoption than on technology. The same leaders estimated that only 25 percent of their workforce uses AI regularly.