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The imperative to embrace the strategy moment

AI’s biggest constraint may no longer be technology—it is CEO ambition and organizational design. While 89% of organizations now use AI in at least one function, only about 6% qualify as high performers generating significant earnings impact, exposing a widening gap between adoption and value creation. The strategic imperative is to move beyond dispersed pilots and concentrate investment on two or three domains where AI can fundamentally reshape economics, growth, and competitive advantage.

As explored in our article, durable differentiation will come less from widely available models than from proprietary data, decision logic, institutional learning, and faster feedback loops. CEOs must personally drive this shift—reallocating capital, redesigning work around human–AI teams, and creating a culture that rewards experimentation and learning. The winners will use productivity gains to fund growth and continuously reinvent their competitive edge.

“We asked four general-purpose large language models (LLMs) 87 questions about company financials, repeated each question several times, and compared the results with those from McKinsey Value Intelligence (MVI), our vetted and deterministic single source of truth for corporate financial metrics.

For simple lookups of uncalculated numerical metrics, the LLMs landed close to our vetted values roughly 60 to 75 percent of the time. For calculated financial metrics, they returned the expected value less than 50 percent of the time, and often less frequently.

Our insight is that a financial metric derived without transparency and determinism is unlikely to be useful. To be trusted, calculated metrics require a stated definition, a source hierarchy, and an audit trail.”

Our weekly podcast features exclusive conversations on issues important to CEOs, CFOs, and their teams.

Featured episode: How strategy creates value – The four foundations that drive long-term performance
Executives have more data, more frameworks, and more advice than ever, and yet their confidence in their strategies keeps falling. Our experts discuss how winning companies leverage the four foundations that drive long-term performance and value creation.

Our latest podcasts include:

- How to drive transformations with rigor (Ep 323)
- Capturing value in real estate’s new terrain (Ep 322)
- M&A integration: PE’s new value creation playbook (Ep 321)

Follow Inside the Strategy Room on your favorite podcast player.

Shareholder activism is changing. Are companies ready? Boards and CEOs can build value-creation plans that withstand and even benefit from shareholder activist scrutiny.

The cash hiding in plain sight. Companies often have significant opportunities to unlock cash. Four practices can help CFOs free it up.

Here’s why some US industrial companies achieve higher multiples. Not every industrial company in a high-growth market earns a higher valuation. The biggest winners consistently combine four management actions.

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