Michael Chui
McKinsey commentary
Senior fellow
AI agents have been the subject of intense buzz and excitement. Already, about a quarter of our survey respondents report that they have started scaling at least one agentic AI system, but usually only in one or two business functions. Looking across the entire enterprise landscape, the use of agents is not yet widespread. This gap highlights the contrast between the great potential that manifests in a “hype cycle” and the current reality on the ground: For those companies that respondents say have started to use agents in any particular business function, most of them are still in the exploratory stages. And as we recently documented in another article about the lessons we’ve learned from a year of building agentic AI tools: When it comes to agents, it takes hard work to do it well.