McKinsey 2025 study on state of AI

It looks like the major consulting companies are putting out their white papers on artificial intelligence. First up is McKinsey’s 2025 study.

The link to their website is here.

The first major takeaway is the continuing increase in uptake of AI. Each year more and more people are using AI. That is not a major surprise here.

I think the main surprise, at least for me, is that fact that some companies, especially the large majors, are getting value from the AIs. I’ve been reading a lot that companies were hard pressed to find positive ROI so for McKinsey to unearth those that are finding significant value and revenue uptick is news to me.

Study questions

The study went over a couple of questions about rolling out AI

• who should lead the AI transformation – CEO, IT or something else?
• should it be centralized or decentralized?
• do they monitor AI outputs and if so, how much?
• what is it companies and boards are concerned about? (inaccuracy or hallucinations, cybersecurity, IP infringement, regulatory compliance, privacy, explainability, labor displacement, bias or equity and fairness, national security, environmental impact, political stability)
• who are they hiring? how easy is it to find candidates?
• how much reskilling are being done?
• what will be the headcount impact?

Various points to note

I found it interesting that around 27% monitor ALL AI outputs for accuracy and a similar amount monitoring less than 20%.

As for training, there are plans to increase the training, maybe due to some difficulty in finding candidates with AI skills, although not as much as in prior years.

And headcount impact is mixed: some industries see a reduction in headcount where others see an increase, mainly in IT/tech personnel. That would be the software/tech industry foreseeing an increase in in headcount.

If I understand correctly, the areas where the largest increase in AI use (or the greatest value) lies in marketing and sales, product development, customer service, and software engineering.

And there is also quite a bit of cost reduction, euphemism for headcount reduction. So, jobs are being impacted.

Headlines of the past week

That last bit about headcount reduction jives with the scary headlines I’ve been seeing this week. Something along the lines of “it is projected that 50% of the jobs will be taken over by AI by 2030”.

Or “executives are planning on replacing 50% of their employees.”

YouTube videos are all screaming that we only have 2 more years before…

Or maybe “50% of all entry level positions are gone”.

And then there are a couple displaying some whiz-bang kid using AI to generate a mult-million dollar business.

But it is mostly depressing news.