A MESA GROUP RESEARCH SUMMARY
What Actually Moves Earnings
McKinsey tested twenty-five attributes against EBIT. The winners were organizational.
McKinsey and Company, The State of AI · A Mesa Group summary
It is one thing to show that AI deployments fail. It is another to show what the companies getting paid are doing differently. McKinsey ran that test.
The finding
The attributes tied to earnings were organizational, not technical
McKinsey tested twenty-five organizational attributes against how much impact respondents reported generative AI having on their EBIT.
Across organizations of all sizes, the attribute with the largest effect was fundamental redesign of workflows. And a chief executive's oversight of AI governance came back as one of the elements most correlated with higher bottom-line impact. At larger companies specifically, that oversight was the element with the most impact on EBIT attributable to generative AI.
Not the model. Not the vendor. Not the size of the technology budget. How the work was arranged, and who owned the decisions.
How the analysis was run
The twenty-five attributes were assessed against reported EBIT effect using a relative weights regression, which is a method for estimating how much each factor contributes when many of them overlap. The analysis returned an R-squared of 0.20.
That figure is worth stating plainly. It means these attributes explain a meaningful share of the variation between companies, not all of it. And because the earnings impact is self-reported by respondents, this is a correlation, not a controlled proof of cause.
It is still the most direct evidence available that the difference between AI that pays and AI that does not is organizational.
What it reframes
AI governance is usually filed under risk. Something a compliance function owns, a cost of doing business, a brake on the pace of deployment.
This finding puts it somewhere else entirely. In McKinsey's data, the companies where a named executive owned AI governance were the companies reporting earnings impact. Defined ownership is not what slows deployment down. It is what makes deployment worth doing.
Why it matters
Read alongside the same study's finding that only 28 percent of organizations have a CEO who owns AI governance, the two numbers form a single argument.
The thing most correlated with getting paid is the thing most companies have not done.
THE ORIGINAL STUDY
McKinsey and Company, QuantumBlack. The State of AI: How organizations are rewiring to capture value.
This page is a Mesa Group summary of independent research published by the organization named above. Mesa Group has no affiliation with it. Read the full study at the link.
ABOUT MESA GROUP
Mesa Group is a professional services firm in the Command Mapping category. The firm maps decision authority across an organization's operations and builds the working systems that authority calls for, delivered with full client ownership. Mesa Point leads the mapping practice. Mesa Built leads the building practice.The firm's principle is constant: automation with authority.