McKinsey has recently released a research paper about the role of AI in the workplace (based upon Reid Hoffman’s recent book - Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future).
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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.
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
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I will have something to say about that tomorrow - particularly about the societal impacts on organisational longevity.
But, for now, compare and contrast the above absolutist statement with the below (from the same report):
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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.
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The stark contradiction in McKinsey's research reveals (IMHO) corporate AI's current reality gap.
On one hand, they trumpet AI as the modern steam engine with "$4.4 trillion in added productivity growth potential," suggesting a revolution already transforming work. Yet in the very same report, they admit only 1% of companies have reached "maturity" with AI actually integrated into workflows and delivering meaningful business outcomes.
This disconnect exposes the hollow nature of much AI hype – we're simultaneously told that a world-changing technology has definitively "arrived in the workplace" while acknowledging that 99% of organisations haven't figured out how to use it effectively.
It's a classic case of selling the dream while quietly admitting the reality falls drastically short, leaving us to wonder whether the emperor of corporate AI is wearing any clothes at all.