OUR BEST IDEAS FOR THE C-SUITE

Welcome to the latest edition of The CEO Shortlist, a biweekly newsletter of our best ideas for the C-suite. In this issue, we examine what companies are getting from their AI investments and how they can make agentic workflows pay off. We appreciate the opportunity to connect and hope you find our perspectives useful and thought provoking. You can reach us at Alex_Panas@McKinsey.com and Becca_Coggins@McKinsey.com. Thank you, as ever.

—Alex and Becca

The state of AI. Individual employees are seeing real benefits from AI: In McKinsey’s latest global survey, 80 percent say it has improved their productivity, and half say it helps them make better decisions. Enterprise financial impact, however, has not kept pace. The share of companies crediting AI with a measurable effect on EBIT holds at 37 percent, essentially unchanged from a year ago, even as more organizations scale the technology across the enterprise. A small group of high performers—about 6 percent—stands apart by redesigning workflows around AI rather than adding it to existing ones. Our new research explains how. 

The economics of AI agents. Token prices keep falling, yet enterprise AI spending is climbing. Optimization efforts tend to target model choice and token consumption, since those are the most visible expenses. But for a customer service agent in banking, tokens can account for just 20 to 25 percent of a run’s cost; human oversight makes up 70 to 75 percent. The number that matters is the fully loaded cost to finish a job—a resolved claim or a completed onboarding—set against the value it creates. Our colleagues lay out how leaders can decide where agents justify the spend. 

We hope you find these insights helpful. See you in a couple of weeks with more McKinsey ideas for the CEO and others in the C-suite.

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