Almost every major company in the world is experimenting with artificial intelligence, but almost none are changing meaningfully as a result, McKinsey’s Greater China chairman Joe Ngai told Consensus Hong Kong on Thursday.
Internal surveys show that 98% of business leaders report implementing some form of artificial intelligence, Ngai said. But when asked how much of that has been implemented at scale, that number “drops significantly” to less than 20%, he said. When it comes to measurable bottom line impact, it’s 5%.
The bottleneck, Ngai argued, is not technical capacity, it is organizational design.
Modern businesses, he said, are built on “layers of people, hierarchies, managers and reporting.” In an AI-native world, that structure becomes friction.
Instead of reinventing business models, most companies are layering AI pilots on legacy processes, seeking approvals, testing small use cases and protecting reporting lines.
“That’s not actually where you get the most benefit from artificial intelligence,” Ngai said. “The bottleneck of AI implementation is actually people.”
From his vantage point in China, Ngai sees a different approach. Chinese companies have spent a decade digitizing mobile and data operations. As a result, “the reception … of agents and artificial intelligence is far greater,” with less resistance from work structures and legacy governance.
Unlike the Western discourse, which often focuses on boundary models and artificial general intelligence, China’s focus is pragmatic: “There is much less talk about the models … there is much more talk about use.”
Ngai also highlighted embodied AI, such as robotics, automation and autonomous driving, as an important frontier. Given the scale of China’s supply chain, he predicts a coming “robot dividend,” arguing that the country may soon deploy more robots than humans, offsetting demographic decline and reshaping industrial productivity.
Ngai described 2026 as defined by two opposing forces: geopolitical uncertainty and technological acceleration. CEOs are navigating tariffs and fragmentation on the one hand and AI-driven transformation on the other. Nevertheless, the companies’ earnings remain robust.
