We know we will make money from AI, but seriously how long until that happens?
To create our report, we surveyed 3,613 employees (managers and independent contributors) and 238 C-level executives in October and November 2024. Of these, 81 percent came from the United States, and the rest came from five other countries: Australia, India, New Zealand, Singapore, and the United Kingdom. The employees spanned many roles, including business development, finance, marketing, product management, sales, and technology. All the survey findings discussed in the report, aside from two sidebars presenting international nuances, pertain solely to US workplaces. The findings are organized in this way because the responses from US employees and C-suite executives provide statistically significant conclusions about the US workplace. Analyzing global findings separately allows a comparison of differences between US responses and those from other regions.
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Artificial intelligence has arrived in the workplace and has the potential to be as transformative as the steam engine was to the 19th-century Industrial Revolution.1“Gen AI: A cognitive industrial revolution,” McKinsey, June 7, 2024. With powerful and capable large language models (LLMs) developed by Anthropic, Cohere, Google, Meta, Mistral, OpenAI, and others, we have entered a new information technology era. McKinsey research sizes the long-term AI opportunity at $4.4 trillion in added productivity growth potential from corporate use cases.2“The economic potential of generative AI: The next productivity frontier,” McKinsey, June 14, 2023.
Therein lies the challenge: the long-term potential of AI is great, but the short-term returns are unclear. Over the next three years, 92 percent of companies plan to increase their AI investments. But while nearly all companies are investing in AI, only 1 percent of leaders call their companies “mature” on the deployment spectrum, meaning that AI is fully integrated into workflows and drives substantial business outcomes. The big question is how business leaders can deploy capital and steer their organizations closer to AI maturity.
This research report, prompted by Reid Hoffman’s book Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future3Reid Hoffman and Greg Beato, Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future, Authors Equity, January 2025. asks a similar question: How can companies harness AI to amplify human agency and unlock new levels of creativity and productivity in the workplace? AI could drive enormous positive and disruptive change. This transformation will take some time, but leaders must not be dissuaded. Instead, they must advance boldly today to avoid becoming uncompetitive tomorrow. The history of major economic and technological shifts shows that such moments can define the rise and fall of companies. Over 40 years ago, the internet was born. Since then, companies including Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft have attained trillion-dollar market capitalizations. Even more profoundly, the internet changed the anatomy of work and access to information. AI now is like the internet many years ago: The risk for business leaders is not thinking too big, but rather too small.
