McKinsey top exec: AI is making workers, not companies, more productive

McKinsey's Eric Kutcher said AI has increased workers' productivity more than that of the organizations they work for.

Jemal Countess/Getty Images for Fortune Media McKinsey's Eric Kutcher says AI is boosting workers more than organizations as a whole.

The firm's North America chair said companies must rethink how they work to achieve broad gains.

Software is a bright spot: AI has helped developers generate more code and release features faster.

AI is helping workers get more done, though not necessarily delivering broad benefits for the organizations that employ them, according to a top McKinsey & Company executive.

Eric Kutcher , a senior partner and chair of McKinsey North America, told reporters at the company's media day on Wednesday that outside specific areas such as software development, many of the hoped-for productivity increases have yet to materialize across companies.

"You have people that are getting more productive as individuals, but they're just changing some of the work that they're doing," he said.

Until companies look at the scope of work across an organization and identify inefficiencies in the system, it's hard to generate sweeping increases in output , Kutcher said.

"We have not gotten enterprise-level productivity, with the exception of a few areas," he said.

Early on, he said, many companies' attempts to supercharge workers' productivity meant giving them access to tools like Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's ChatGPT and, in some cases, telling them to use them as much as possible.

Kutcher said that some companies even ranked who was using the most AI tokens "without realizing those tokens cost money." That gap between workers' and companies' results shows up in McKinsey data.

In August, the consulting firm's AI division, called QuantumBlack, reported that in a survey, eight in 10 respondents said AI had increased their productivity.

At the same time, the survey found that the share of respondents who said that AI had contributed to their organization's profits from core operations — before interest and taxes — was essentially flat from a year earlier, at 37%.

Kutcher said the technology's benefits have materialized in areas such as software, where developers have used AI to generate more code .