McKinsey's new State of AI report: 80 percent of people are faster, 37 percent of companies are richer. What that means for a ten-person business.

The numbers, without the jargon

McKinsey measures profit as EBIT, which is earnings before interest and taxes. Read it as profit.

• 0180 percent of respondents say AI has improved their personal productivity.
• 0237 percent say AI has contributed to company profit. Unchanged from 2025.
• 03About 6 percent are high performers, where AI accounts for a meaningful share of profit. Also unchanged.
• 04Among large companies, the share running AI agents in at least one department rose from 27 to 40 percent. Among smaller companies it stayed at 22 percent.
• 05About one in five say the running cost of AI is now limiting how much they use it.

So people are faster and companies are not richer

That is the finding. Individuals save time. The company does not see it, because the saved time is scattered across people who each do a little of something, and the process around them did not change. A faster draft of an email that still goes through the same three approvals is not a faster business.

McKinsey's high performers did something different. They redesigned the workflow around the tool instead of handing the tool to people and hoping. The report's word for the systems that do this is agents: software that carries a task from start to finish rather than answering a question and waiting.

Why a small business can do this faster

A 5,000-person company redesigning a workflow is a year-long project with a committee. A ten-person company can redesign one on a Tuesday. You know every step because you do them. The report shows the biggest firms pulling ahead on agents while smaller firms stood still, but scaling across forty departments is their problem, not yours. You have one workflow to fix at a time.

One more number worth knowing: 32 percent of respondents said they skipped buying a piece of software this year because AI coding tools let them build it themselves. Custom software that fits your exact process used to be a large-company luxury. It is not anymore.

Three moves that translate

Take the report's lessons down to your size.

• Pick one whole task, not one tool. The phone that rings while you are with a customer, the quote that takes two days, the invoice that goes out late. Fix the whole path from trigger to done.
• Measure the business number, not the time saved. Missed calls that became bookings. Quotes sent the same day. Days to get paid. If it does not show up there, it did not happen.
• Keep a person where judgment matters. Respondents expecting to cut staff next year rose from 14 percent who actually did last year to 39 percent who expect to. Expectations have run ahead of reality every year of this survey. The pattern that works is a person plus a system.

The honest caveat

This is a survey of mostly large companies answering questions about themselves. Treat the percentages as direction, not precision. The direction is clear enough: the money is in changing how work flows, and small companies can change how work flows this month.