Uploaded September 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
AI investment is strong and growing even as companies increasingly come to terms with escalating costs – with some organizations seeing LLM spending triple. Business leaders who once left AI decisions to technology teams are now asking hard questions about what they’re getting for all the spend. The real opportunity, however, isn’t in lowering costs but in maximizing returns from agentic AI.
This focus is acquiring greater urgency, with the latest State of AI report showing that just five percent of companies getting significant EBIT impact from AI. Closing the gap between spend and value is emerging as a critical governance frontier, one traditional IT budgeting wasn't built for, but that forward-looking organizations are now moving quickly to solve.
Drawing on lessons from our work with clients, managing AI economics at our own scale, and McKinsey's annual State of AI research, senior partners Tanguy Catlin and Lari Hämäläinen will discuss how to evaluate agentic AI against the fully loaded cost of the work it replaces, what lessons are emerging for better managing costs, and how to better decide where to scale investment and where to pull back.
AI investment is strong and growing even as companies increasingly come to terms with escalating costs – with some organizations seeing LLM spending triple. Business leaders who once left AI decisions to technology teams are now asking hard questions about what they’re getting for all the spend. The real opportunity, however, isn’t in lowering costs but in maximizing returns from agentic AI.
This focus is acquiring greater urgency, with the latest State of AI report showing that just five percent of companies getting significant EBIT impact from AI. Closing the gap between spend and value is emerging as a critical governance frontier, one traditional IT budgeting wasn't built for, but that forward-looking organizations are now moving quickly to solve.
Drawing on lessons from our work with clients, managing AI economics at our own scale, and McKinsey's annual State of AI research, senior partners Tanguy Catlin and Lari Hämäläinen will discuss how to evaluate agentic AI against the fully loaded cost of the work it replaces, what lessons are emerging for better managing costs, and how to better decide where to scale investment and where to pull back.
