The Missing Half OF AI
Evidence

What the research actually says

Every figure this series uses, with its primary source. 33 anchors from MIT, BCG, PwC, McKinsey, Deloitte, KPMG, Gartner, RAND, Stanford, Harvard and EY. Where a number is a forecast rather than a measurement, or where the exact sentence isn’t on the page we link to, it says so.

Deep links were checked against the primary sources. Several publishers block automated access but load normally in a browser. Corrections welcome — tell me what I got wrong.

Value

The core. What the four dimensions below have to add up to.

77% vs 20%
77 percent versus 20 percent positive business outcomes, depending on how confident the organisation is in its talent.
KPMG Global AI Pulse Survey, 2026 · 20 countries, published 31 March 2026

Intent

Why, before the tool.

95%
95 percent of enterprise GenAI pilots show no measurable P&L impact
MIT (NANDA / Project NANDA), 2025
10-20-70
10 percent algorithm, 20 percent data and technology, 70 percent people, process and culture
BCG, 2025
80/20
80 percent of the value of an AI initiative comes from redesigning the work, 20 percent from the technology
PwC (2026 AI Business Predictions), 2026
#1 root cause
Miscommunication between the problem side and the solution side is the single most common root cause of failed AI initiatives — not the model, the data or the budget.
RAND Corporation, 2024
40% by 2027
Gartner predicts that more than 40 percent of agentic AI projects will be cancelled by the end of 2027.
Gartner, 2025
A prediction, not a measurement.

Trust

The real adoption curve.

66% / 46%
66 percent use AI regularly, but only 46 percent trust it.
KPMG / University of Melbourne (Trust, attitudes and use of AI), 2025 · n=48,340 across 47 countries, Nov 2024–Jan 2025
qualitative
Sustained AI use can erode trust within a team and the willingness to disagree — what the authors call trust ambiguity.
Jayshree Seth & Amy C. Edmondson, Harvard Business Review, 2026
qualitative
Trust in AI follows trust in leadership, not the accuracy of the tool.
David De Cremer, Harvard Business Review, 2025
71% (2023) / 64% (2025)
71 percent of employees report anxiety in connection with AI (2023); 64 percent of executives name fear of replacement, rather than augmentation, as a brake on AI adoption (2025).
EY — zwei getrennte Surveys, 2025
EY research, cited with attribution. Two separate surveys: the 71 percent are employees in 2023, the 64 percent are executives in 2025 speaking about adoption — not employees about their own use.
52%
52 percent say they feel nervous about AI.
Stanford AI Index 2026, 2026
Nervousness about AI products and services in general, not specifically at work.
2-5 years (2030 forecast) / 8-12 years (historical)
By 2030, the half-life of technical skills will shrink to two to five years — down from eight to twelve years historically
Gartner, "Predicts 2026: AI's Impact on the Future of Workforce", 2025

Alliance

One team, not two halves.

50% by 2027
By 2027, 50% of companies that attributed headcount reduction to AI will rehire staff to perform similar functions, but under different job titles.
Gartner, 2026
A prediction, not a measurement. Issued by Gartner's Customer Service & Support practice; the forecast sentence itself names no industry limit, but the underlying data does. From the same source family, a figure that cuts the other way: only about 20 percent of customer service leaders reported any AI-driven headcount reduction.
+40% / -19pp
Within the capability frontier: +25% speed, +12% completion, +40% quality. Outside it: 19 points more often wrong.
Dell'Acqua, Mollick, Lakhani et al. (Harvard/BCG RCT), 758 Consultants, 2023
+15% (QJE 2025)
Support agents gain 15 percent productivity on average. The distribution is the actual finding: the least experienced improve both speed and quality, while the most experienced gain little speed and lose some quality.
Brynjolfsson, Li, Raymond, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2025
The widely cited 14% / 34% come from the 2023 NBER working paper. The version published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics reports 15 percent on average and does not put a number on novices in the abstract.

Leadership

What the machine can’t lead.

97% vs 28%
At a large technology company, 97 percent of senior leaders said they clearly understood the strategic priorities. Across 124 organisations, 28 percent of the managers responsible for execution could name three of them; around 30 percent could not name a single one.
MIT Sloan Management Review — Donald Sull, Charles Sull, James Yoder, 2018 · 124 organisations; leaders and middle managers with execution responsibility
Verified at the primary source on 25 July 2026. A widely repeated secondary version — "50% of top management teams" — is wrong: the population is leaders and middle managers with execution responsibility, and the figure is 28%. The measure is generous: any three of the top five priorities counted as a match.
72% / 50%
72 percent of CEOs are now the primary decision-maker on AI, twice as many as the year before; 50 percent see job stability tied to AI strategy.
BCG AI Radar 2026, 2026 · n=2,360 including 640 CEOs, 16 markets
92% vs 62% (30 pts)
Where AI strategy is communicated clearly, 92 percent report a positive productivity effect — against 62 percent where communication is unclear.
EY Agentic AI Workplace Survey, 2025 · n=1,148 US desk workers, Aug–Sep 2025
EY research, cited with attribution.
28%
Twenty-eight percent of respondents whose organizations use AI report that their CEO is responsible for overseeing AI governance; 17 percent say the board of directors is. CEO oversight of AI governance is among the elements most correlated with higher self-reported bottom-line impact from gen AI.
McKinsey (QuantumBlack, 'rewiring to capture value'), 2025 · McKinsey Global Survey on the state of AI, n=1,491 participants at all levels of the organization, fielded 16–31 July 2024
21%
Twenty-one percent of respondents whose organizations use gen AI say those organizations have fundamentally redesigned at least some workflows — and of 25 organizational attributes tested, workflow redesign has the biggest effect on whether a company sees EBIT impact from gen AI.
McKinsey QuantumBlack — The state of AI: How organizations are rewiring to capture value, 2025 · McKinsey Global Survey on the state of AI, n=1,491 participants at all levels of the organization, fielded 16–31 July 2024
Verified in McKinsey's own report PDF on 24 August 2026. Two things the number is often quoted without: the base is respondents whose organizations use gen AI, not all companies — and the bar is fundamental redesign of at least some workflows, not workflow change in general. Field work July 2024; the November 2025 edition does not restate an overall share, but reports 55% for AI high performers against 20% for all other respondents.
84%
84 percent of organizations have not redesigned jobs or workflows around AI
Deloitte State of AI in the Enterprise 2026, 2026
Verified 13 August 2026 at a Deloitte-owned page quoting the 2026 report. Note the wording: 'jobs or workflows', not 'work' in general.
94% / 62%
94 percent of CIOs report an increased appetite for AI investment over the past year; 62 percent report compromising on governance due to limited knowledge.
Logicalis 2026 CIO Report (Feldarbeit: Vanson Bourne), 2026 · n>1,000 CIOs globally (EMEA, APAC, US, South America), organisations with 250+ employees, fielded late 2025

Across all four

Figures that don’t belong to one dimension.

qualitative
Groups of people working together in superminds — like hierarchies, markets, democracies, and communities — have been responsible for almost all human achievements in business, government, science, and beyond.
Thomas W. Malone, MIT Center for Collective Intelligence — "Superminds", 2018
qualitative
AI shifted from being a tool to a teammate. This is unprecedented. We now have intelligence and expertise on tap.
Karim Lakhani, Harvard Business School — Microsoft WorkLab interview, 2025
qualitative
You're not going to lose your job to an AI, but you're going to lose your job to someone who uses AI.
Jensen Huang, NVIDIA — Milken Institute Global Conference, 2025
57% / 43%
Overall, we saw a slight lean towards augmentation, with 57% of tasks being augmented and 43% of tasks being automated.
Anthropic Economic Index, 2025
95% / 8%
95 percent of organizations now have an AI strategy... yet only 8 percent said they had established return on investment, even though 64 percent reported meaningful business value.
KPMG Global AI Pulse Survey (erste Ausgabe), 2026 · n=2,110 C-suite/senior leaders, 20 markets, organisations ≥$100M revenue, fielded 17 Feb–17 Mar 2026
qualitative
we want to build tools to augment and elevate people, not entities to replace them.
Sam Altman, OpenAI — eigener X-Account, 2026
qualitative
More and more customers and partners are turning to SAP to gain real business value from AI.
Christian Klein, SAP CEO — zitiert von diginomica, 2026
+1,165%
Forward deployed engineer job postings grew 1,165 percent year-over-year (January–October 2025 vs. the same period in 2024).
Bloomberry (unabhängige Analyse von 1.000+ FDE-Stellenausschreibungen), 2025
qualitative
AI sometimes functions more like a teammate than a tool. While not human, it replicates core benefits of teamwork.
Ethan Mollick, Wharton — "One Useful Thing" (eigener Substack), 2025
qualitative
When AI is focused on augmenting humans rather than mimicking them, then humans retain the power to insist on a share of the value created.
Erik Brynjolfsson, Stanford — "The Turing Trap: The Promise & Peril of Human-Like Artificial Intelligence", 2022
qualitative
We also recognize that the most important use of a tool as powerful as AI is to augment humanity, not to replace it.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li, Stanford HAI — McKinsey Author Talks, 2023