4 ms·

The state of AI in 2026: On the road to ROI

27 points by swolpers 1mo ago

mjhay 1mo ago
The ROÍ will be happening any day now, we promise. Please hire more McKinsey consultants who say they’re AI experts.
- walt_grata 1mo ago
  Is there a company that has been more damaging to the software industry than these jokers?
  - inigyou 1mo ago
    Apple?
    - piva00 1mo ago
      The one who invested in LLVM?
      - inigyou 1mo ago
        The one who normalised needing approval from the device maker to run code.
    - sublinear 1mo ago
      I'm about as much of an Apple hater as anyone else, but you're probably thinking of user interface design (or CUPS).
    - MeetingsBrowser 1mo ago
      How so?
  - dgellow 1mo ago
    Oracle maybe?
    - deadbunny 1mo ago
      I can't believe I'm saying this but, Oracle at least provides a useful product.
  - sailfast 1mo ago
    I dunno is creating chaos that requires many expensive rewrites damaging to the industry? I kid of course - their recommendations on management of technical teams are fly-in, fly-out out of context garbage in my experience. Usually results in poor but justified decisions from senior leaders that happen in cycles of 3-5 years.
  - __MatrixMan__ 1mo ago
    Microsoft comes to mind, with their anti-open-source era, their bullying of security researchers, and several other infractions. Plus I suspect they're gearing up for some shenanigans re: their auth portal.
- bwfan123 1mo ago
  > Please hire more McKinsey consultants who say they’re AI experts You have to recognize that a vast majority of enterprises fall in the category of "Dumb IT". To them, IT is a cost-center and overhead as their main line of business is something else. And, they look up to the likes of McKinsey for wisdom.
  - mjhay 28d ago
    Yeah, you’re right about that. They view IT as a “cost center” to be cut to the bone (despite being essential to their product and strategy in most cases), while they have no problem with paying consultants astronomical hourly rates for nonsense like this. I get that these companies (airlines, widgets, whatever) don’t see IT as a thing that generates revenue, but it’s like having electricity or running water. You don’t think about it much, but if you don’t have it, you’re fucked.
- downrightmike 1mo ago
  Yeah, what happened in Q2 is CFOs freaked out over a modest increase in the share of the AI costs being shifted to them, away from VCs
ivolimmen 1mo ago
> Organizations are using agentic coding tools to build software in-house in lieu of purchasing it. Nearly a third of respondents (32 percent) report that their organizations have decided against buying one or more software products or features because they could be built internally with agentic coding tools. People think they can do it themself... kind of like how everyone build their own database using Microsoft Access in the 90's. When all software developers needed to repair all the issues...
- PaulRobinson 1mo ago
  I am at a point in my career where I'm figuring out where I want to spend the last 15 years of it. I don't want to work in corporate for a long stretch of it. It seems to me, being a consultant to fix all those messes could be a good seam of code face to get stuck into...
  - rwmj 1mo ago
    It's going to be a horrible job though, the equivalent of fixing Y2K bugs in Cobol code except with code bases that even more vast and unintelligible.
    - jeffreyrogers 1mo ago
      The LLMs are pretty good at helping with that though.
      - sph 1mo ago
        I want to believe this is witty sarcasm, given the topic, but you never know these days.
        jeffreyrogers 1mo ago
        No, it's been my experience asking LLMs to explain complicated code to me. They can do a pretty good job of it. You can also ask them to write a bunch of tests and then rip out the old implementation and fix it with a new one. LLMs aren't perfect but they are really good at understanding and writing code.
lukewarm707 1mo ago
i look forward to mckinsey being replaced by ai.
- antisthenes 1mo ago
  No need, you can replace them with a single sentence. Do the most unethical profit-maximizing thing, but also account for the eventual lawsuits and loss of goodwill in your calculation.
dgellow 1mo ago
Do I understand correctly that means there is no AI ROI to show off yet? If correct that’s pretty bad, no?
- an0malous 1mo ago
  There’s a concept of an ROI
  - yanis_t 1mo ago
    Vibe ROI-ing
- rozal 1mo ago
  [dead]
- Kassam_L 1mo ago
  For the internet in many cases it took a decade or longer too, no? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox
  - dgellow 1mo ago
    Correct, which is why we went through the initial dotcom bubble, the initial enthusiasm didn’t match the ROI and resulted in a massive resource misallocation. A tiny bit like the AI rollout?
- 23918-16254 1mo ago
  Directionally, we'll have ROI by 2100 if we build 1000x more data centers. Growth mindset!
simianwords 1mo ago
As expected the thread is filled with smug comments on how it is definitely not ROI positive. The thing I think about is AI is already at that spot where you don’t need a survey or a Randomised Controlled Trial to prove it makes one productive. Sometimes things are that obvious. But these kind of tests and surveys appeal to a certain kind of person who considers IMO the wrong type of things as rigorous.
- jeffreyrogers 1mo ago
  It makes organizations more productive at producing code and doing other tasks, but translating that into something that affects PnL is different. Where I work it's sped up individual tasks I've worked on but I don't think it's sped up delivery timelines of any of the major projects I'm involved in. We just added additional verification work with the extra cycles the engineers have now. It's not like that work is useless. It will probably mean I have less debugging to do in the future, but when you look at how the business makes money I don't see it making a big impact.
  - simianwords 1mo ago
    Based on what you said, would you think firms would dial down AI use in the coming years? If not it stands to reason that it did have big impact.
    - jeffreyrogers 1mo ago
      I think it is easy for companies to waste time and money on lots of things when it is hard to measure the impact. For example, I think most people would agree that the big tech companies are bloated and have too many employees for the amount of work they have. There's not really an incentive to fix problems, and in some cases (like with headcount) there are counter-incentives (managers want to have more reports). I think companies will get better at measuring the impact of AI and attributing it to increasing profit or decreasing costs, and that the companies that are better at this will have an advantage over those that are worse, so eventually overall efficiency will improve.
    - 1mo ago
zerolayers 1mo ago
This McKinsey? https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-resolution-criminal-and-civil-investigations-mckinsey-companys https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-a...
kittikitti 1mo ago
I wouldn't trust anything McKinsey publishes.
theptip 1mo ago
> About four in ten respondents (37 percent) report that AI has contributed positively to their organizations’ EBIT, essentially unchanged from 2025—despite growth in the share of organizations scaling AI technologies. But respondents do cite other organization-wide benefits: most notably, improvements in innovation, competitive differentiation, customer satisfaction, and employee satisfaction. I view this mostly as a case of uneven diffusion. Consider your priors on the tech savviness of the bottom 50% of enterprises, let alone the bottom 25%. Many companies won’t adopt AI for 5 years. Now model how a 5% difference in growth plays out; not enough to sink stragglers immediately. The other interesting bit is a 5% increase in EBIT could be a smaller productivity increase in the margin, eg you lowered prices by 2% and some fraction of your competitors’ customers noticed. Basically, nothing revolutionary but I think it’s an error to read this as “we don’t see ROI yet”. The other interesting point is one of legibility; the difference between “employees using AI” and “business function has rolled out AI”. > Among AI tools, chatbots are the most widely scaled, with 47 percent of respondents saying their organizations are scaling them across the enterprise We should look into the details, but I read this as: ~everyone is using AI ad-hoc, the 47% is the consultant-y “leadership has stood up a measurable initiative to scale AI…”. By construction, Gartner cannot measure the on-the-ground adoption.
VCFundedGenYer 1mo ago
"AGI next <week/month/year/decade>, promise" (Statement has been made since 2022)
fittingopposite 1mo ago
Since when are these reports behind registration forms?

27 points by swolpers 1mo ago

mjhay 1mo ago

The ROÍ will be happening any day now, we promise. Please hire more McKinsey consultants who say they’re AI experts.

walt_grata 1mo ago
Is there a company that has been more damaging to the software industry than these jokers?
- inigyou 1mo ago
  Apple?
  - piva00 1mo ago
    The one who invested in LLVM?
    - inigyou 1mo ago
      The one who normalised needing approval from the device maker to run code.
  - sublinear 1mo ago
    I'm about as much of an Apple hater as anyone else, but you're probably thinking of user interface design (or CUPS).
  - MeetingsBrowser 1mo ago
    How so?
- dgellow 1mo ago
  Oracle maybe?
  - deadbunny 1mo ago
    I can't believe I'm saying this but, Oracle at least provides a useful product.
- sailfast 1mo ago
  I dunno is creating chaos that requires many expensive rewrites damaging to the industry? I kid of course - their recommendations on management of technical teams are fly-in, fly-out out of context garbage in my experience. Usually results in poor but justified decisions from senior leaders that happen in cycles of 3-5 years.
- __MatrixMan__ 1mo ago
  Microsoft comes to mind, with their anti-open-source era, their bullying of security researchers, and several other infractions. Plus I suspect they're gearing up for some shenanigans re: their auth portal.
bwfan123 1mo ago
> Please hire more McKinsey consultants who say they’re AI experts You have to recognize that a vast majority of enterprises fall in the category of "Dumb IT". To them, IT is a cost-center and overhead as their main line of business is something else. And, they look up to the likes of McKinsey for wisdom.
- mjhay 28d ago
  Yeah, you’re right about that. They view IT as a “cost center” to be cut to the bone (despite being essential to their product and strategy in most cases), while they have no problem with paying consultants astronomical hourly rates for nonsense like this. I get that these companies (airlines, widgets, whatever) don’t see IT as a thing that generates revenue, but it’s like having electricity or running water. You don’t think about it much, but if you don’t have it, you’re fucked.
downrightmike 1mo ago
Yeah, what happened in Q2 is CFOs freaked out over a modest increase in the share of the AI costs being shifted to them, away from VCs

ivolimmen 1mo ago

> Organizations are using agentic coding tools to build software in-house in lieu of purchasing it. Nearly a third of respondents (32 percent) report that their organizations have decided against buying one or more software products or features because they could be built internally with agentic coding tools. People think they can do it themself... kind of like how everyone build their own database using Microsoft Access in the 90's. When all software developers needed to repair all the issues...

PaulRobinson 1mo ago
I am at a point in my career where I'm figuring out where I want to spend the last 15 years of it. I don't want to work in corporate for a long stretch of it. It seems to me, being a consultant to fix all those messes could be a good seam of code face to get stuck into...
- rwmj 1mo ago
  It's going to be a horrible job though, the equivalent of fixing Y2K bugs in Cobol code except with code bases that even more vast and unintelligible.
  - jeffreyrogers 1mo ago
    The LLMs are pretty good at helping with that though.
    - sph 1mo ago
      I want to believe this is witty sarcasm, given the topic, but you never know these days.
      - jeffreyrogers 1mo ago
        No, it's been my experience asking LLMs to explain complicated code to me. They can do a pretty good job of it. You can also ask them to write a bunch of tests and then rip out the old implementation and fix it with a new one. LLMs aren't perfect but they are really good at understanding and writing code.

lukewarm707 1mo ago

i look forward to mckinsey being replaced by ai.

antisthenes 1mo ago
No need, you can replace them with a single sentence. Do the most unethical profit-maximizing thing, but also account for the eventual lawsuits and loss of goodwill in your calculation.

dgellow 1mo ago

Do I understand correctly that means there is no AI ROI to show off yet? If correct that’s pretty bad, no?

an0malous 1mo ago
There’s a concept of an ROI
- yanis_t 1mo ago
  Vibe ROI-ing
rozal 1mo ago
[dead]
Kassam_L 1mo ago
For the internet in many cases it took a decade or longer too, no? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox
- dgellow 1mo ago
  Correct, which is why we went through the initial dotcom bubble, the initial enthusiasm didn’t match the ROI and resulted in a massive resource misallocation. A tiny bit like the AI rollout?
23918-16254 1mo ago
Directionally, we'll have ROI by 2100 if we build 1000x more data centers. Growth mindset!

simianwords 1mo ago

As expected the thread is filled with smug comments on how it is definitely not ROI positive. The thing I think about is AI is already at that spot where you don’t need a survey or a Randomised Controlled Trial to prove it makes one productive. Sometimes things are that obvious. But these kind of tests and surveys appeal to a certain kind of person who considers IMO the wrong type of things as rigorous.

jeffreyrogers 1mo ago
It makes organizations more productive at producing code and doing other tasks, but translating that into something that affects PnL is different. Where I work it's sped up individual tasks I've worked on but I don't think it's sped up delivery timelines of any of the major projects I'm involved in. We just added additional verification work with the extra cycles the engineers have now. It's not like that work is useless. It will probably mean I have less debugging to do in the future, but when you look at how the business makes money I don't see it making a big impact.
- simianwords 1mo ago
  Based on what you said, would you think firms would dial down AI use in the coming years? If not it stands to reason that it did have big impact.
  - jeffreyrogers 1mo ago
    I think it is easy for companies to waste time and money on lots of things when it is hard to measure the impact. For example, I think most people would agree that the big tech companies are bloated and have too many employees for the amount of work they have. There's not really an incentive to fix problems, and in some cases (like with headcount) there are counter-incentives (managers want to have more reports). I think companies will get better at measuring the impact of AI and attributing it to increasing profit or decreasing costs, and that the companies that are better at this will have an advantage over those that are worse, so eventually overall efficiency will improve.
  - 1mo ago

zerolayers 1mo ago

This McKinsey? https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-resolution-criminal-and-civil-investigations-mckinsey-companys https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-a...

kittikitti 1mo ago

I wouldn't trust anything McKinsey publishes.

theptip 1mo ago

> About four in ten respondents (37 percent) report that AI has contributed positively to their organizations’ EBIT, essentially unchanged from 2025—despite growth in the share of organizations scaling AI technologies. But respondents do cite other organization-wide benefits: most notably, improvements in innovation, competitive differentiation, customer satisfaction, and employee satisfaction. I view this mostly as a case of uneven diffusion. Consider your priors on the tech savviness of the bottom 50% of enterprises, let alone the bottom 25%. Many companies won’t adopt AI for 5 years. Now model how a 5% difference in growth plays out; not enough to sink stragglers immediately. The other interesting bit is a 5% increase in EBIT could be a smaller productivity increase in the margin, eg you lowered prices by 2% and some fraction of your competitors’ customers noticed. Basically, nothing revolutionary but I think it’s an error to read this as “we don’t see ROI yet”. The other interesting point is one of legibility; the difference between “employees using AI” and “business function has rolled out AI”. > Among AI tools, chatbots are the most widely scaled, with 47 percent of respondents saying their organizations are scaling them across the enterprise We should look into the details, but I read this as: ~everyone is using AI ad-hoc, the 47% is the consultant-y “leadership has stood up a measurable initiative to scale AI…”. By construction, Gartner cannot measure the on-the-ground adoption.

VCFundedGenYer 1mo ago

"AGI next <week/month/year/decade>, promise" (Statement has been made since 2022)

fittingopposite 1mo ago

Since when are these reports behind registration forms?