88% Use AI. 39% See Profit From It. The Difference Is Workflow Redesign

McKinsey's State of AI survey reported that 88% of respondents say their organisations regularly use AI in at least one business function, up from 78% a year earlier. In the same survey, just 39% reported EBIT impact at the enterprise level. Adoption is effectively solved. Value is not.

The survey tested 25 organisational attributes against the ability to see EBIT impact from generative AI. The attribute with the biggest effect was the redesign of workflows. And only 21% of respondents whose organisations use gen AI said they had fundamentally redesigned even some workflows as a result.

That is the whole story in two numbers. Nearly everyone has bolted AI onto an existing process. One in five has changed the process. The first group is buying a faster version of the work they were already doing, which is why the saving evaporates somewhere between the team and the P&L.

A concrete example from our own delivery: a client generating quotes had a five-step process — enquiry in, spec clarified by phone, price built in a spreadsheet, document formatted, approval chased by email. Adding an AI writing assistant to step four made document formatting faster and changed nothing commercially, because the bottleneck was the two days of chasing in step five. Redesigning the workflow so that pricing rules ran automatically against the CRM record and approval was a single in-system action moved quote turnaround from four days to under one. That is a revenue number, not a productivity anecdote.

The survey also found 80% of companies set efficiency as an objective of their AI initiatives, while the firms capturing the most value more often added growth or innovation objectives. Efficiency targets encourage bolt-ons. Growth targets force you to ask what the process should look like if you designed it today.

The practical test before any AI spend: name the step you will delete. If you cannot name one, you are automating the symptom. Redesign first, then automate what remains — that ordering is what the data says separates the 39% from everyone else.