Bryce Hall
McKinsey commentary
Associate partner
We’ve been conducting research on AI for seven years now, and the pace of innovation, the evolution of new companies and capabilities, and the wave of investment have been remarkable. And now we’re seeing how leading companies are capturing business value from these often-dazzling AI and generative AI (gen AI) capabilities.
One of the most interesting findings in this year’s survey is that among the high performers capturing the most value from gen AI, most solutions are highly customized or bespoke (what we refer to as “shaper” or “maker” archetypes of gen AI solutions). While many companies are finding value from off-the-shelf gen AI solutions (or the “taker” archetype), capturing the full value of this technology often requires significant customization—for example, training models on proprietary company and customer data or tuning models to improve performance within a specific industry or business context.
The survey also sheds new light on high performers’ practices. High performers, for example, are significantly more likely than others to embed testing and validation in the release process for models, as well as to develop clear processes to iteratively improve model outputs. Over time, these kinds of practices will become even more important, as highly customized and bespoke solutions are the ones that will truly be differentiating for companies. Off-the-shelf solutions, by contrast, are likely to become table stakes. Collectively, these data on practices are consistent with our ongoing work and research on digital and AI transformations, which shows that competitive advantage comes from building organizational and technological capabilities to broadly innovate, deploy, and improve solutions at scale—in effect, rewiring the business for distributed digital and AI innovation.