McKinsey's 2026 survey: small firms stall at 22% agent…

The gap between large-enterprise and smaller-firm agent adoption widened in a year, and sales and marketing functions are where founders will feel it first.

McKinsey’s State of AI in 2026, released last week and drawn from 1,719 professionals and business leaders, records a 13-point jump in agent scaling at organizations above $1 billion in annual revenue, from 27 percent to 40 percent, per The Register’s readout. Smaller firms sat flat at 22 percent, according to AI Agent Store’s summary of the same data. That’s the story of the year in one line.

Zoom out and the gap is structural, not vibes. Senior fellow Michael Chui frames the shift as “real ROI” but adds that “it’s a journey, not a destination.” The journey metaphor is doing quiet work: 37 percent of respondents attribute at least some EBIT impact to AI, about the same share as in 2025, and just 6 percent qualify as McKinsey’s “high performers,” the cohort attributing at least 5 percent of EBIT to AI. In any given business function, no more than 10 percent of respondents say their organizations are scaling agents at all.

So what’s compounding at the top? Workflow redesign, mostly. Salesforce’s Agentic Enterprise Index, drawn from production activity across 400 businesses and nearly 5,000 people surveyed, shows average deployed agents per organization nearly tripling from five in early 2025 to 13 by April 2026, agent creation time down 53 percent, employee sessions tripled, and seven in ten customer-service sessions now handled autonomously. OpenAI’s Presence platform, made available through a limited GA program on July 22, is the enterprise packaging of the same trend; OpenAI reports 75 percent of inbound issues resolved without human assistance on its own 1-888-GPT-0090 line, with a Codex-powered loop cutting human handoffs 15 percentage points over ten days. BBVA in Mexico, SoftBank in Japan, and Australian insurer IAG are the reference customers.

Meanwhile 80 percent of individual AI users report productivity gains that haven’t translated into enterprise-level financial impact, 20 percent say operating costs already constrain use, and 39 percent expect their employer to cut jobs because of AI in the coming year, up from 32 percent in 2025. Thirty-two percent of organizations have skipped a software purchase because agentic coding tools let them build it in-house.

The 22 percent line isn’t a plateau. It’s a widening delta.

McKinsey's 2026 survey: small firms stall at 22% agent scaling as big enterprises leap to 40%

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