Workers are adopting AI technology faster than many of their leaders realize. This finding is one of several highlighted in McKinsey’s latest report, Superagency in the Workplace. All this week, our data visualizations will focus on themes from this report, such as employee enthusiasm for AI and the technology’s economic potential. For more, see the report.
Although almost all companies invest in AI, their spend doesn’t fully align with the economic potential in their industries, say Senior Partner Lareina Yee and coauthors. For example, the consumer industry has the second-highest potential for value realization from AI but appears to be least willing to invest among the top 25 percent of spenders, based on self-reported percentage of revenue spend in a McKinsey survey. This might be due to the industry’s low average net margins in mass-market categories leading to higher confidence thresholds for adopting expensive, organization-wide technology upgrades.
Image description:
A scatterplot of area bubbles shows the relationship between the industry percentage of companies in the top quartile of gen AI spending on one axis, and their overall survey representation on the other axis. The size of each circle represents the economic potential of the industry in billions of dollars. The industries are further categorized into two groups: those with higher spending and those with lower spending relative to their overall survey representation.
Healthcare and technology are in the top quartile of gen AI, where spending is higher than their share in the overall survey. Technology’s circle is larger than healthcare, suggesting a greater economic potential. Media and telecom and advanced industries also fall into the higher spending category, with smaller circles than healthcare and technology, indicating a lower economic potential. Agriculture is also in the higher spending category but has the smallest circle of the group. All of the industries show less than 20% on the overall survey representation axis.
In contrast, financial services; energy and materials, consumer goods and retail, hardware engineering and construction, and travel, transportation, and logistics are in the lower range of gen AI spend, where spending is higher than their share in the overall survey. The circles for these industries are generally larger than the higher-spend circles for agriculture, media and telecom, and advanced industries. Among the lower-spending industries, consumer goods and retail has the largest circle. The circles representing energy and materials, hardware engineering and construction, and travel, transportation, and logistics are clustered together, and only slightly smaller than financial services, indicating relatively similar economic potentials.
Note: This image description was completed with the assistance of Writer, a gen AI tool.
Source: The economic potential of generative AI: The next productivity frontier, McKinsey, June 14, 2023; McKinsey US CxO survey, Oct–Nov 2024 (n = 118).
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To read the report, see “Superagency in the workplace: Empowering people to unlock AI’s full potential,” January 28, 2025.