AI is helping some workers get more done, but McKinsey North America chair Eric Kutcher says the gains have yet to translate into broad productivity growth for companies. The gap matters: giving people AI tools is not the same as redesigning work around them.
Watch Desk analysis
What happened
Kutcher told reporters at McKinsey’s media day that, outside areas such as software development, many hoped-for company-wide productivity gains have yet to materialise. Business Insider reports that he said workers may be getting more productive while simply changing which tasks they do.
The article cites a McKinsey survey in which eight in ten respondents said AI had increased their productivity. The share saying AI contributed to their organisation’s core operating profits was 37%, essentially flat from a year earlier. Among organisations using AI, the share moving beyond experiments and pilots into scaling rose six percentage points from 2025 to 2026.
Why it matters
Those figures point to a familiar workplace divide: AI can make an individual task faster without improving the whole organisation’s output or profits. Kutcher says companies need to examine work across the organisation and rethink processes, rather than simply distribute tools and count usage.
That is a useful distinction for workers and managers alike. More AI use is not, by itself, evidence that a business is getting more productive; sometimes it just means the old process now has a chatbot in it.
Our read
The interesting question is no longer just whether AI helps someone finish a task faster. It is whether employers can turn those local gains into better processes and meaningful results. Kutcher’s comments and the survey figures suggest that second step is still uneven. Treat the productivity numbers as reported survey responses, not proof that every user or organisation is seeing the same effect.
What to watch
- Whether more organisations move from AI pilots to scaled deployment.
- Whether reported worker productivity gains are followed by stronger measures of organisation-level output or profit.
- Which business processes companies redesign, rather than simply adding AI tools to existing ones.
Discussion spark: Should employers be judged on how many people use AI, or on whether they redesign work and show measurable organisation-wide gains?
Sources and evidence
- McKinsey top exec: AI is making individual workers, not companies, more productive – Business Insider (9 October 2026, 09:44 UTC)
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