Productivity is the floor of AI’s value, not the ceiling. New McKinsey research on where the durable returns actually live, and what that means for teams deciding what to build. Press enter or click to view image in full size Generated with AI by Author At the end of 2025, almost nine in ten organizations surveyed by McKinsey in The state of AI in 2025: Agents, innovation, and transformation reported using AI in at least one business function. Ninety-four percent reported they were not yet seeing significant value from those investments. That gap, examined in “Where AI will create value and where it won’t” in the April 2026 issue of McKinsey Quarterly , is not an adoption problem. It is a framing problem. Most companies are using AI to do their existing work faster, when the durable returns require a different kind of work entirely. A team I spoke with recently had compressed their discovery cycle from six weeks to ten days using AI. They were proud, and the throughput was real.…