Almost every major company in the world is experimenting with artificial intelligence, but almost none are changing significantly as a result, McKinsey Greater China President Joe Ngai told Consensus Hong Kong on Thursday.
Internal surveys show that 98% of corporate executives report having implemented some form of AI, Ngai said. But when asked how much of that is implemented at scale, “that number drops significantly” to less than 20%, he said. When it comes to a measurable impact on profits, it is 5%.
The bottleneck, Ngai argued, is not technical capacity, but organizational design.
Modern corporations, he said, are based on “layers of people, hierarchies, managers and reports.” In an AI-native world, that structure becomes friction.
Instead of reinventing business models, most companies are incorporating AI pilots into legacy processes, seeking approvals, testing small use cases, and protecting reporting lines.
“That’s actually not where you get the biggest benefits from AI,” 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 their operations around mobile and data. As a result, “reception… about agency and AI is much greater,” with less resistance from legacy governance and employment structures.
Unlike Western discourse, which often focuses on frontier models and artificial general intelligence, China’s approach is pragmatic: “There’s a lot less talk about models… there’s a lot more talk about usage.”
Ngai also highlighted embedded 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 could soon deploy more robots than humans, offsetting demographic decline and reshaping industrial productivity.
Ngai described the year 2026 as defined by two opposing forces: geopolitical uncertainty and technological acceleration. CEOs face tariffs and fragmentation on the one hand, and AI-driven transformation on the other. However, corporate profits remain resilient.
