McKinsey: only the firms that redesign work see AI hit EBIT

New McKinsey research, reported by Fortune this week, lands on an uncomfortable fact: nearly nine in ten companies now use AI somewhere in the business, yet only about a third say it has made any real dent in operating profit - a figure that has not moved in a year. Adoption is close to universal; impact is not.

The gap, the research argues, separates a small group of high performers from everyone else. What sets them apart is not a better model or a bigger budget - it is that they tore up and rebuilt the underlying workflow instead of bolting AI onto the old one. Roughly three-quarters of that group redesigned how the work actually happens, and they are the ones who can point to AI in their EBIT line.

That distinction is what Uprovd is built to enforce. We treat AI as an investment that has to show up in an outcome the business already tracks, not a tool to be praised for being busy. When the yardstick is profit moved rather than seats filled, the deployments that earn their keep - and the ones quietly redesigning nothing - both become obvious.