Meet the moment

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Navigate change with McKinsey’s best 2024 insights
Generative AI has sparked a renaissance in business innovation—and this year, the boldest leaders have started to realize value from it.
There’s room for more to blaze a trail. CEOs, boards, and top executives across industries can transform their organizations with gen AI as their copilot. To get started, they can take a page from companies that have flourished and begin rewiring their organizations to outcompete.
But embracing innovation isn’t just about being open to new technology. Leadership, too, calls for courageous, incisive change, and some of our most actionable insights this year mapped that journey. Growth remains as important as ever, but how to sustain it? Organizations should zero in on what they do best, cultivating their superpowers to amplify growth for the long run.
As you revisit McKinsey’s sharpest takes from 2024, you’ll find several articles from McKinsey Quarterly, now celebrating 60 years of helping executives define the most valuable opportunities on the management agenda—and how to act on them.
Through insights, images, and arresting data, our year-in-review experience reflects on the most interesting trends and topics of 2024. We hope it will get you thinking about what comes next—in gen AI, leadership, and more—and set you up to make brilliant moves in 2025 and beyond.

Keeping up with gen AI

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Digital leaders have widened their competitive distance by 60 percent in the past three years, according to senior partner Eric Lamarre and colleagues. But tortoises have a way of catching up: to stay ahead, leaders will have to accelerate their transformations.
While last year was largely about generative AI (gen AI) pilots, this year has seen the technology driving revenue increases—most notably in supply chain and inventory management—and cost reductions (exhibit). According to senior partner Nicolai Müller, gen-AI-powered automation alone “can unleash … about $3.5 trillion to $4 trillion, which is approximately the GDP of the UK.” And the boldest organizations moved quickly: check out this case study on McKinsey’s work helping the global bank ING launch a customer-facing chatbot in only seven weeks.
A horizontal bar chart shows that 16 to 23% of survey respondents identified 3 business functions that were most likely to see revenue increases of at least 5% from adopting generative AI: supply chain and inventory management; marketing and sales; and risk, legal, and compliance. A second bar chart, ranging from 18 to 31%, highlights 3 functions reporting at least a 10% decrease in costs: human resources; software engineering; and risk, legal, and compliance.
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The groundswell of investment in gen AI has been particularly notable because investment in technology as a whole this year fell by as much as 40 percent, says senior partner Lareina Yee in our annual report on tech trends.
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We are in a golden age of innovation and possibility in terms of technology. The drop in investment was between 30 and 40 percent, which is about $570 billion. What’s interesting is that, despite that drop in investment, we do see that there are pockets amongst the trends that are continuing to see a rise in investment. To no surprise an example of this is gen AI. But what might be less expected is in areas such as robotics, as well as in climate and sustainability technology.”
Lareina Yee
Lareina Yee
Senior partner, Bay Area
McKinsey itself is a case in point. “We chose to take a page out of our own book, quite literally, and approach this as part of our own Rewired transformation with clear targets,” says senior partner Rodney Zemmel, describing the firm’s own AI transformation featuring our internal gen AI platform, Lilli.
A donut-style pie chart shows that 72% of firm members are active on Lilli.
Meet some of our impact partners
Aamer Baig
Senior partner, Chicago
Alex Singla
Senior partner, Chicago
Alexander Sukharevsky
Senior partner, London
Kate Smaje
Senior partner, London
Lareina Yee
Senior partner, Bay Area
Rodney Zemmel
Global leader, McKinsey Digital and Firmwide AI Transformation, and senior partner, New York

Leading into the future

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Intensifying geopolitical risk, serial disruptions, changing talent needs: “the world needs great leaders right now,” says senior partner Carolyn Dewar, one of the authors of CEO Excellence (165,000 copies sold and counting). This year, we caught up with Carolyn and her coauthors to learn how their approach to CEO counseling remains applicable in the current moment.
One thing the book doubles down on is the danger of complacency. Even for those out in front on generative AI and innovation, resting on laurels is a losing game. “Success breeds complacency,” says senior partner Scott Keller, quoting engineer Andy Grove, “and complacency breeds failure.”
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I think some of the interesting conversations around complacency come up when folks are a few years into the [CEO] role ... They’re saying ‘OK, I got through the first three, four years. I nailed it. I had my agenda. I made it happen. I’m good now, right?’ That’s one of the moments when you need to be really careful.”
Carolyn Dewar
Carolyn Dewar
Senior partner, Bay Area
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      Leaders also need to understand their own biases and limitations. As the authors of McKinsey’s 2024 bestseller, The Journey of Leadership, point out, the strongest leaders know that the best decisions aren’t made in isolation—as they discuss in the video clip above.
      What’s more, early research this year from the McKinsey Center for CEO Excellence’s new proprietary assessment tool, led by senior partner Gautam Kumra, found that a cohort of more than 100 CEOs—largely headquartered in Asia—were most confident about mobilizing their teams but least confident about engaging their boards.
      Despite prevailing winds, leaders can look to today’s leading companies for guidance in weathering the storm. Senior partner Liz Hilton Segel identified six factors that have time and again produced competitive advantage for the long haul.
      One of those factors is investing in employees, and existing talent needs to be reskilled and upskilled for roles where data is likely to play a larger part (exhibit). But people typically don’t reskill themselves; it’s up to leaders to ensure their people have the tools they need to succeed.
      A text table lists job roles emerging with the adoption of generative AI. Existing roles that will incorporate new generative AI skills include data architects, data engineers, data modelers, and data scientists. New roles created by the technology adoption include AI ethics stewards, prompt engineers, and unstructured-data specialists.
      Meet some of our impact partners
      Dana Maor
      Senior partner, UK, Ireland, and Israel
      Kurt Strovink
      Senior partner, New York
      Ramesh Srinivasan
      Senior partner, New York
      Michael Birshan
      Senior partner, London
      Vik Malhotra
      Senior partner, New York
      Daniel Pacthod
      Senior partner, New York

      Choosing resilience through uncertainty

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      If the bright-burning star of gen AI is the most significant opportunity companies are currently exploring, inequality and instability that threaten our collective future are among the biggest challenges.
      In partnership with the World Economic Forum, McKinsey’s global managing partner Bob Sternfels and coauthors have developed a Global Cooperation Barometer to measure progress according to five pillars: trade and capital, climate and nature, innovation and technology, health and wellness, and peace and security. Most of these metrics have been trending upward since we started measuring, with the troubling exception of peace and security. As we’re all too aware, global conflict is on the rise, and fatalities from conflict have risen more than 60 percent in the past two years.
      A line chart, with 5 lines mostly trending upward from left to right, shows the change in global cooperation metrics index from 2012 to 2022, with the horizontal axis representing years and the vertical axis representing index values, Index values range from 0.7 at the bottom to 1.1 at the top, with the 5 metrics converging at the 1.0 level in 2020. After 2020, the line representing peace and prosperity drops sharply to ~0.8, whereas the other 4 lines either remain flat or rise.
      Climate change is another threat to our collective lives and livelihoods. We’re only 10 percent through the energy transition—and finishing the job is a gnarly challenge. A new McKinsey Global Institute report offers three big ideas for navigating the physical realities of the transition—the “hard stuff”—as recounted here by senior partner Chris Bradley. CEOs we polled this year are also energized by cutting-edge new climate solutions made possible by gen AI.
      At the individual company level, this case study shows how McKinsey helped the airline Lufthansa get a unified and granular view not only of its costs but of its Scope 3 emissions as well.
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          Inequality remains a challenge, too. This year McKinsey published its tenth annual Women in the Workplace report in partnership with LeanIn.Org. The mood wasn’t exactly celebratory: the report found that it will take nearly 50 years to achieve gender parity for all women in the workplace. But there are clear action items for leaders. The report reinforces the importance of culture and mindsets: more than 90 percent of organizations that are top performers in advancing women also see leaders as critical to shaping an inclusivity strategy. They also have a head of diversity, equity, and inclusion or the equivalent. These policies not only address entrenched inequality, but they set the stage for growth.
          A dot plot chart shows results for 3 survey questions that received high marks, ranging from 68 to 96%, from workers reporting that their organization follows practices that advance women. These include having a head of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI); having leadership that plays an active role in shaping DEI strategy; and offering bias training to evaluators involved in hiring and promotions.
          Meet some of our impact partners
          Ida Kristensen
          Senior partner, New York
          Humayun Tai
          Senior partner, New York
          Massimo Giordano
          Managing partner, Europe, and senior partner, Milan
          Olivia White
          McKinsey Global Institute director and senior partner, Bay Area
          Shubham Singhal
          Senior partner, Detroit
          Sven Smit
          Senior partner, chair of Insights and Ecosystems, and chair of McKinsey Global Institute, Amsterdam

          Optimizing for growth

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          Growth, like luck, can be a simple matter of being in the right place with the right offering at the right time. It’s also true that the harder you work, the luckier you can get. McKinsey Global Institute’s new research on the next big arenas of competition points to three ingredients for cooking up some good fortune: business model or technological step changes, escalatory investments, and a large and/or growing addressable market.
          Right now, there are 12 big arenas. By 2040, we think there will be 18. Some industries that aren’t arenas today will enter this realm, including AI, shared autonomous vehicles, space, batteries, and nuclear fission power plants.
          A table lists 5 potential arenas of tomorrow, with proportionally sized circles illustrating estimated revenue and profit for each arena in 2040. AI software and services has the largest circles, with revenue reaching up to $4.6 trillion and profit up to $920 billion. Other arenas have projected revenues ranging from $65 billion to $2.3 trillion in revenue and $5 billion to $460 billion in profit.
          Taking the point on growing markets to a more practical micro level, this case study on our work with Starbucks, led by senior partner Becca Coggins, shows how a focus on inclusivity can lead to a better experience for all customers—and employees. As companies reskill their workers as part of their technological transformations, a common purpose among employees becomes more critical than ever, for both organizational health and corporate performance.
          Two women collaborating in a modern office environment.
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          The world beyond the company is likely to be a pretty interesting place. There’s going to be a lot going on in the world, and a lot going on that’s weighing down our employees, not to mention the specific folks that are immediate to various conflicts and things that are rising. So I think given a world where we’re walking into a lot of unknown and a lot of tension, that makes for a challenging environment. And I think one of the things that we can think through is, how do we recognize all of the tragedy, sadness, emotion that is going on? How do we create in the work environment a space that is a little bit separate from the world that’s going on outside? In that it is a place where we can come together as a team, regardless of where we came from?”
          Bryan Hancock
          Bryan Hancock
          Partner, Washington, DC
          Meet some of our impact partners
          Shelley Stewart III
          Global leader, Reputation & Engagement, and senior partner, New York
          Alex Panas
          Global leader, Industry Sectors, and senior partner, Boston
          Axel Karlsson
          Global leader, Functional Practices and Growth Platforms, and senior partner, Stockholm
          Eric Kutcher
          Chair, North America, and senior partner, Bay Area
          Gassan Al-Kibsi
          Chair, EEMA, and senior partner, Riyadh
          Tracy Francis
          Managing partner, Latin America, and senior partner, São Paulo

          Top reads of 2024

          Our annual year in charts and year in images collections dive deeper into the themes of 2024. Thank you for reading.
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          2024: The year in charts
          Here’s a look back at some of our favorite data visualizations from the year.
          View the collection
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          2024: The year in images
          Discover how our authors’ words inspired our designers’ most creative choices, offering a hopeful view of a future fueled by sustainable, inclusive growth.
          View the gallery

          Top Ten Lists Of Most Popular Insights

          Special Features

          Sixty years of innovation: Key moments in business technology

          What to read next: McKinsey’s 2024 annual book recommendations

          McKinsey Technology Trends Outlook 2024

          Bridging the women’s health gap: A country-level exploration

          Ten unsung digital and AI ideas shaping business

          Help wanted: The long-term labor tightening trend by country

          Top reports this year

          Our top reports of 2024 focused on the issues resonating most across organizations and society, from the potential of generative AI to the state of women in the workplace.
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          Global Private Markets Report 2024: Private markets in a slower era
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          According to McKinsey’s latest Global Private Markets Review, private markets entered a slower era in 2023, with macroeconomic headwinds, rising financing costs and an uncertain growth outlook weighing on fundraising, deal activity and performance.
          A silhouette image featuring photos of diverse women of all ages and background. This year marks the 10th anniversary of the annual Women in the Workplace report in partnership with Lean In.
          Women in the Workplace 2024: The 10th-anniversary report
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          In the tenth year of our Women in the Workplace research, in partnership with LeanIn.Org, we reflect on the notable gains women have made—and how their experiences at work are, in many ways, the same or worse than ten years ago.
          Illustration featuring a silhouette of a woman's head with a sunrise and cloud multiple exposure background.
          Closing the women’s health gap: A $1 trillion opportunity to improve lives and economies
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          Investments addressing the women’s health gap could add years to life and life to years—and potentially boost the global economy by $1 trillion annually by 2040.
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          Generative AI in the pharmaceutical industry: Moving from hype to reality
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          The technology could offer pharma companies a once-in-a-century opportunity—but only if they learn to scale it and address the industry’s unique challenges.
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          Top M&A trends in 2024: Blueprint for success in the next wave of deals
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          Will 2024 launch a bright new era for M&A? Anticipating what could be an inflection point, many dealmakers are preparing for a surge—and new market requirements—in the year ahead.
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          2023 ESG Report: Accelerating sustainable and inclusive growth for all
          We are driving measurable progress on sustainable and inclusive growth in the societies where we operate. Our 2023 ESG Report details how we are making an impact through our client work, our insights, our actions, and our giving.

          Popular Series & Experiences

          McKinsey Quarterly: 60th birthday edition
          We’re commemorating our flagship publication’s milestone birthday with a year of themed issues, special interactive features, and timeless Quarterly classics newly released from the archives. It’s all available with a free digital Quarterly membership.
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          McKinsey Explainers
          Direct answers to complex questions, backed by McKinsey’s expert insights.
          Author Talks
          Author Talks
          Dive into insightful conversations with authors on crucial management topics including leading through a crisis, unleashing innovation, coping with organizational culture shifts, and more.
          McKinsey on Lives & Legacies
          McKinsey on Lives & Legacies
          Monthly round-ups of obituaries from business and society, highlighting the lasting legacies of executives and leaders from around the globe.
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          McKinsey Publishing Guides
          Introducing McKinsey’s first-ever email guides, designed to empower professionals with the insights and skills they need to thrive in today’s complex business environment.
          McKinsey Quarterly Five Fifty
          The Five Fifty
          A quick briefing in five—or a fifty minute deeper dive. Register now for your weekly dose of smart, delivered to your phone.

          Popular Special Collections This Year

          Explore a few of our most visited special collections from 2024, which draw together articles, multimedia, and more to deeply engage on many facets of a single topic.
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          McKinsey and the World Economic Forum 2025
          McKinsey collaborates with the Forum through multiple industry action groups, research and publications that help inform the...
          Glass and metal waves propagating in a loop.
          Generative AI in operations
          Technology is only powerful if it is applied where and when it matters.
          The US government collection
          The US government’s productivity improvement opportunity
          This series explores McKinsey’s finding of roughly $750 billion annually that could be saved while keeping US government services...
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          The seasons of the CFO
          The CFO role has never been harder. Each phase of a CFO's career requires unique skills. Follow us as we interview former CFOs...

          Popular videos

          Watch some of our most compelling videos of 2024, with topics including leadership, generative AI, consumer insights, and more.

          Popular Podcasts This Year

          In 2024, listeners tuned in for insights on bad bosses, empathy at work, preparing for the CEO role, and more. Explore some of our most streamed podcasts, and check out The McKinsey Podcast for even more audio.
          Six simple white vases arranged in a row, each holding a single-stemmed flower. Five of the flowers are vibrant red, but one dull-seeded dandelion rises slightly taller than the rest.
          Why so many bad bosses still rise to the top
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          Narcissism. Overconfidence. Low EQ. Why do we persist in selecting for leadership traits that hamper organizational progress—and leave the right potential leaders in the wrong roles?
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          How to prepare for the CEO role
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          Becoming a high-potential candidate for the top job starts with asking the question: Why do I want to be the CEO?
          Mother, holding her baby, sits at desk while video conferencing with her co-workers.
          Busting myths about women in the workplace
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          Professional women’s progress can feel painfully slow. At this point, what’s really holding women back?
          Aerial view of a bridge across a bay at sunset.
          The shape of talent in 2023 and 2024
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          If 2023 was the year of the manager and the launchpad for generative AI, what will 2024 bring for talent leaders?
          Reid Hoffman headshot illustration
          Gen AI: A cognitive industrial revolution
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          Silicon Valley pioneer Reid Hoffman explains why we should view generative AI as a “steam engine of the mind” that promises to profoundly alter our professional and personal lives.
          A smiley face with two coffee cups for the eyes and a white line for the mouth.
          It’s cool to be kind: The value of empathy at work
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          Hybrid work. Talent shortages. Polarizing politics. Building a culture is tougher than ever. Recent research reveals the difference empathy can make—as well as how to develop it in your workplace.

          McKinsey on Books

          The Journey of Leadership book cover

          The Journey of Leadership

          Today’s CEOs operate in an increasingly high-risk environment, expected to tackle more complexity and make bigger swings, with no second chances. This has taken a toll: the average tenure of an S&P 500 CEO is at an all-time low. When the pressure is on, how can CEOs reinvent themselves too, along with their organizations?
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          Acknowledgments

          McKinsey Global Publishing would like, first and foremost, to thank the many authors of these articles and other insights for their contributions and analysis.

          And we want to acknowledge the many direct contributors who offered vital energy and expertise—under extraordinary personal and professional circumstances—to the development, editing, risk review, copyediting, fact checking, data visualization, design, production, and dissemination of all of McKinsey’s content over the past year.

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