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According to a forthcoming report by management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, 80 percent of global businesses surveyed rely on AI for routine operations. Only around half are using the technology for complex higher-level planning and strategy. “AI adoption is quite widespread but still more shallow than some would anticipate,” Christoph Kuntze, a partner at McKinsey, says. MicKinsey’s 2025 Supply Chain Risk Pulse Survey analyzes responses from supply chain executives around the world across various sectors including retail, tech, pharmaceuticals, life sciences, and automotive. The goal is to take a snapshot of AI adoption and its risks. “AI is obviously evolving very fast. So what we might find this year may be different next year, and certainly will be this year after,” Kuntze says. Featured Video An Inc.com Featured Presentation These AI tasks are popular Artificial intelligence tools can take many forms—from being used for analysis, to generating new content, or as an agent that can take actions on someone’s behalf. The survey found that analytical AI is popular for data science work, and generative AI has gained widespread use for helping workers with tasks like drafting emails or finding data within reports. Agentic AI, meanwhile, is used less. “In the analytical space AI is adopted widely—in the demand forecasting or inventory optimization space—and generative AI is widely adopted with programs like ChatGPT or Copilot, helping workers and even executives with everyday tasks,” Kutze says. Strategy-related work, meanwhile, is inherently complex, and can rely on agentic AI, which deploys agents to perform and string together a series of tasks, elevating the tool’s capabilities. “That’s really the latest frontier,” Kuntze says. “We’re seeing a lot of research and development, but not a lot of adoption yet.” In fact, while many feared job cuts driven by AI replacing humans, the survey found that 80 percent of companies are using AI to support their employees rather than replacing them. Still, recent layoffs like Amazon’s 14,000 announced job cuts are partially attributed to AI. Humans still wanted Even as AI adoption continues to spread, companies are struggling to find individuals capable of scaling up their use of AI. The survey found that only one in ten companies report having sufficient in-house AI or digital expertise, and, despite AI’s rapid scaling, this figure has remained relatively the same for half a decade. “The biggest obstacle to scaling AI isn’t the technology. It’s really finding people who converge the data science and the real-world operations and then essentially string those thoughts together in a way that makes sense,” Kutze says. The struggle is real, with the survey finding that only 19 percent of companies surveyed have finished their AI projects, and two percent have restarted due to early failures. Kutze recommends for founders to look for “the right talent and making sure that you have the right digital-first mindset as part of your company, so that that doesn’t become a bottleneck over time.”
