AI is scaling, but where is the company-wide earnings impact?

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Companies with more than $1 billion in annual revenue may have a leg up in the AI scaling race, according to a recent survey. But it isn’t just the big dogs that are benefiting from the technology.

McKinsey’s recent State of AI in 2026 report found that companies with at least $1 billion in annual revenue are the ones deploying agentic tools the most. But it also found that 44% of all companies surveyed, up six percentage points year over year, reached the AI scaling phase this year.

The online survey conducted from May 4 to June 8, 2026, received responses from more than 1,700 people globally across company sizes, industries, and regions. More than a third of respondents (36%) indicated their organizations earned more than $1 billion.

CFOs are being tasked with scaling AI more and more, in large part to find the ROI from the technology.

For a smaller enterprise looking to move from piloting to scaling AI, McKinsey’s report found that chatbots have been widely scaled, and therefore can be an accessible starting point. But successful deployments look different across industries, according to the survey.

Who, and what for? “Organizations are scaling AI in the functions with the greatest potential value for their industries,” the McKinsey report noted. Technology companies, for example, “much more commonly report[ed] using AI agents in their software engineering than [did] respondents in other industries,” the report said.

Companies in consumer goods and retail are using agents in sales and marketing, while advanced manufacturing companies are using them in “supply chain and inventory management and in the manufacturing process.”

There is still a divide among companies with $1 billion in revenue annually versus those with less than $1 billion: Year over year, the percentage of those earning more than $1 billion who said they were “at least scaling” AI agents grew 13 percentage points, to 40%. Those making less than $1 billion who noted “at least scaling” AI only grew one percentage point, to 22%.

Narrow impact. While survey respondents across organizational roles reported positive impacts of AI on their own productivity, McKinsey said “these individual gains have yet to translate into broad financial impact for organizations.”

Nearly the same percentage of respondents as last year, 37%, reported that AI positively contributed to their organization’s earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT)—“despite growth in the share of organizations scaling AI technologies.” Still, respondents did cite enterprise-wide “improvements in innovation, competitive differentiation, customer satisfaction, and employee satisfaction.”

Respondents also noted cost reductions in specific business functions over the past 12 months, most frequently “from AI use in supply chain management, service operations, and manufacturing.”

Almost every sector represented expected to see their companies’ AI investment grow in the next year. These anticipated increases were highest in pharma and medical products, insurance, and financial institutions, according to the survey.

AI spend. “AI-related operating costs are beginning to constrain AI use for about one in five organizations,” according to McKinsey. Recent volatility in AI spend and token cost is enough to make a CFO anxious, but McKinsey senior fellow Michael Chui wrote that, “even as per-token costs have declined, the number of tokens consumed and generated has increased even faster.”

And because “these use cases have demonstrated value,” Chui wrote, “organizations are planning to invest more, even as they develop new disciplines for optimizing ROI from their AI expenditures.”