So firms being "on the road to ROI"
To McKinsey is the equivalent of me saying "I'm on the road to NYC" if I just left the San Francisco city limits riding my bicycle down the shoulder of I-80.
McKinsey says enterprise AI is finally 'on the road to ROI'
Four years into the generative AI revolution, consulting giant McKinsey reckons we've finally started the engine and are officially "on the road to ROI." Whether that road leads to actual profit-making and how long it takes to travel is anyone's guess, because the firm's data suggests most respondents still aren't reporting an …
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Wednesday 26th August 2026 05:27 GMT DS999
Re: So firms being "on the road to ROI"
with the help of a few billion dollars and continued investor optimism your journey too can be transformational and generate unimaginable levels of even more absurd wealth for just the right people
I'm interested, can you connect me with some private equity firm offering that few billion dollars to sponsor me riding my bike from SF to NYC? They can have their marketing team tie it into AI somehow and make money from it however they can. So long as I get that few billion you're talking about that's what I would consider "generating unimaginable levels of even more absurd wealth for just the right people!"
They can promote it as "the race against the bubble - will DS999 finish his epic journey across the US to cash the $2 billion check we wrote him before the AI bubble bursts and the check becomes worthless?"
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Tuesday 25th August 2026 20:17 GMT Anonymous Coward
So that's what McKinsey says.
Sorry. I wouldn't believe McKinsey if they issued a statement that "Red and green are colors" without independent verification. I've seen too many of their epic statements go down in flames and have observed the utter lunacy of their management advice. Not saying that _all_ of their "gurus" are incompetent, but I generally take their pronouncements with a whole shovelful of salt.
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Wednesday 26th August 2026 08:55 GMT Bebu sa Ware
Re: Shovels, whisky, whores
One of Dolly Parton's quotes being thrown around today seem rather apt in this context:†
"It costs a lot of money to look this cheap."
The output from AI not only "cheap" but decidedly tawdry and costs much more than we can afford - not just in money.
†A great lady clearly with a great sense of humour - both doubtless will be missed by a great many.
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Tuesday 25th August 2026 21:38 GMT cookiecutter
this would be the same mckinsey that left a load of open APIs with no passwords on the internet & access to all their internal documents?
the same mckinsey who; from the book "when mckinsey comes to town" - turned up to Zero accident Disney World - asked "why are you checking the belts on the roller coasters daily when there haven't been any accidents?" - followed by the inevitable.
As ever if someone from mckinsey told me it was sunny, i'd take an umbrella
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Tuesday 25th August 2026 23:04 GMT Anonymous Coward
It is easier for smaller companies to achieve an ROI using a closed model LLM as they can still use monthly subscriptions rather than paying the per-Mtoken rates, whereas for larger companies it helps to be using open model LLMs.
You'd have to exclude all such cases from the count of those reporting an ROI before making any predictions about if/when the two main LLM companies (and all those new AI data centres being built) will ever break even.
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Tuesday 25th August 2026 23:26 GMT Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck
When a technology is over-hyped and over-sold with such massive investments and future price increases to cover the cost of those bit-barn investments, there will never be a RETURN on investment for anyone except those running the bit-barns unless one is very, Very, VERY lucky and realigned the business to do its thing using the reworked process flows required. That has always been the fly in the ointment for new technology - in order to realize the gains and purported benefits, you have to restructure your business models and workflows.
Very few organizations are willing to bet the farm that way, so they don't realize the benefits in any significant way.
Just remember the sunk cost fallacy when it comes time to renew those Artificial Ignorance contracts. If you haven't seen benefits in two years of investments, you're just burning cash on a dead end.
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Tuesday 25th August 2026 23:43 GMT Tron
If your staff say AI has increased their productivity...
...then it is clearly time to increase their targets and the point at which they get a bonus. Bit of ROI to be had there, folks.
If the AI companies really want to keep the bubble inflating, they need to find a popular tech website with a comments column and bribe all of the folk on it to say nice things about AI. A million quid for each of us should do it. Peanuts for the top quality PR they would be getting.
Paid in sovereigns please, as gold is likely to notch up a bit when AI mania finally goes TU and dents the fakenomics of Trumpistan.
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Wednesday 26th August 2026 02:36 GMT Pulled Tea
…80 percent of respondents who use AI in their roles said the technology has improved their individual productivity…
Sorry, but ever since that METR study came up and said that developers said they were 20% faster but were in actual fact 19% slower (and their subsequent findings, which amounts to “idk lol ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ no one wants to work without AI tools, also the speedup is no -18% maybe, we can't tell anymore, variance as wide as a barn door”), I'm doing the Chris-Hemsworth-as-Thor-talking-to-Banner face and going, “is it, though?”.
Like, the field is a morass of conflicting data and everyone desperately trying to make a buck, but also, these tools somehow affect one's cognition and one's perception of how well one does one's work. You'd think there'd be more solid numbers other than, “iunno, I feel faster I guess.” Something is up, and somehow I'm skeptical that it's productivity.
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Wednesday 26th August 2026 07:25 GMT LybsterRoy
I do know one person who's used AI tools to modify a database engine source to give features he wants that aren't in the standard. Without AI he would not have been capable of making the changes and probably wouldn't have bothered (like myself he's retired). Not sure if that counts as productivity improvement or not.
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Wednesday 26th August 2026 05:52 GMT deadlockvictim
McKinsey» According to the report, more businesses are deploying more AI in the belief that their investments will start paying off, but the number of people reporting an actual earnings boost from their AI initiatives has remained flat.
Let me re-write that for you: According to the report, more businesses are deploying more AI in the desperate hope that their investments will start paying off, but the number of people reporting an actual earnings boost from their AI initiatives has remained flat.
McKinsey» What do respondents expect AI to mean for headcount? Well, more cuts, apparently.
How about this for a wild idea: don't fire anyone; train up employees on AI and watch especially what the young employees do with it. I suspect that they will find new ways & new uses for it that will prove to be especially profitable for your firms in the medium term.
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Wednesday 26th August 2026 07:15 GMT LybsterRoy
-- Chui also said we shouldn't be surprised it's taken several years for AI to begin showing even the smallest bit of ROI for the biggest businesses. --
I'm trying t get my head round this. Does it meant that the biggest companies have started a lot of AI projects and for some of them they have generated more profit than the cost of the project or that the improvement of EBIT is greater than would have been expected without AI and outweighs the cost of AI or what?
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Wednesday 26th August 2026 07:52 GMT trevorde
On the road to ROI
Worked for a company which could be charitably be described as"on the road to profitability". They'd had one good year, about ten years ago, then lost money every year thereafter. They bounced around various vulture capitalists before being bought by Dassault, presumably for access to their customer base. A friend told me they still haven't made a profit.
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Wednesday 26th August 2026 11:47 GMT sketharaman
Money Quote: "It should not be surprising that it has taken time, because it is a reflection of trends we’ve seen with other technologies."
Bingo. I've been selling ERP for 30 years and I still don't know too many companies that would *publicly* acknowledge ROI from their ERP investments. The keyword is "publicly". As anybody who has worked with ROI models would know, ROI calculations touch upon many parameters about the inner workings of a company and quantitatively, not just qualitatively. Going by the truckloads of money invested by companies in new licenses, upgrades, etc. of ERP, they've surely gotten ROI from their ERP investments, just that they don't need to disclose them publicly. This has also been true for SAAS, Cloud, and many other gamechanging technologies of the last few decades. I agree with McKinsey that it won't be any different with AI.
