Nearly every major company in the world is experimenting with artificial intelligence, but almost none are changing significantly, McKinsey Greater China President Joe Ngai told Consensus Hong Kong on Thursday.
Internal surveys show that 98% of business leaders say they are implementing some form of AI, Ngai said. But when asked how much is deployed at scale, “that number drops significantly” to less than 20%, he said. As for the measurable impact on profits, it is 5%.
The bottleneck, according to Ngai, lies not in technical capacity, but in organizational design.
Modern businesses, he said, are built on “multiple layers of people, hierarchies, managers and reports.” In an AI-native world, this structure becomes friction.
Instead of reinventing their business models, most companies layer AI pilots on top of existing processes, seek approvals, test small use cases, and protect reporting lines.
“That’s actually not where you get the most out of AI,” Ngai said. “The bottleneck in AI implementation is actually people. »
From his vantage point in China, Ngai considers a different approach. Chinese companies have spent a decade digitizing their operations around mobile and data. As a result, “there is much greater acceptance…of agency and AI,” with less resistance from legacy labor and governance structures.
Unlike Western discourse, which often focuses on frontier models and artificial general intelligence, the Chinese accent is pragmatic: “We talk a lot less about models… we talk a lot more about their use. »
Ngai also highlighted embodied AI, such as robotics, automation and autonomous driving, as a major frontier. Given the scale of China’s supply chain, he predicts a coming “robot dividend,” saying the country could soon deploy more robots than humans, offsetting population decline and reshaping industrial productivity.
Ngai described the year 2026 as defined by two opposing forces: geopolitical uncertainty and technological acceleration. CEOs must contend with tariffs and fragmentation on one side, and AI-driven transformation on the other. Yet corporate profits remain resilient.
