AI Making Workers More Productive, Not Companies, Claims McKinsey Top Executive

Eric Kutcher, a senior partner and chair of McKinsey North America, has claimed that artificial intelligence (AI) was making employees more productive, but not necessarily delivering benefits to the companies employing them. Speaking at the company's media day on Wednesday (Oct 7), Kutcher highlighted that outside of software development, the productivity gains related to AI were yet to be seen.

As per Kutcher, companies needed to identify inefficiencies in the system first in order to generate 'sweeping increases in output'.

"You have people that are getting more productive as individuals, but they are just changing some of the work that they are doing," Kutcher was quoted as saying by Business Insider.

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

After AI's rise, companies attempted to increase productivity by giving access to tools like Claude and ChatGPT. Kutcher said that some companies even ranked who was using the most AI tokens "without realising those tokens cost money."

According to McKinsey data for the month of August, eight in 10 respondents said AI had increased their productivity. However, the survey also found that the share of employees who said AI had contributed to the company's profits from core operations was flat from a year earlier, at 37 per cent.

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AI And Productivity

Earlier this year, a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) stated that the immediate impact of AI has been negligible. After surveying nearly 6,000 top executives across the US, UK, Germany, and Australia, researchers found that over 90 per cent of firms reported no change in employment or productivity levels over the past three years.

Two-thirds of executives reported using AI, but the usage amounted to only 1.5 hours per week, while 25 per cent of respondents reported not using AI in the workplace at all.

Despite the little impact, these firms remain optimistic about AI eventually coming good at workplaces. Executives believe that AI will increase productivity by 1.4 per cent and increase output by 0.8 per cent over the next three years. Over the next three years, 75 per cent of businesses expect to be using some AI technology.