McKinsey’s 2025 report dropped an awkward number — nearly 90% of companies have adopted AI, but 94% feel they “haven’t seen significant value” [Source: https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/where-ai-will-create-value-and-where-it-wont].
But the same report says AI adoption can boost annual productivity growth by 3.4 percentage points.
On one side, the tool everyone’s hyped about. On the other, 90% of companies not getting anything out of it. What’s happening in the middle?
For solopreneurs, this question hits even closer to home. You don’t have a “company” to restructure workflows for AI — you are the workflow.
The Research: AI Actually Works
That repeatedly cited MIT 2023 study [Source: https://news.mit.edu/2023/study-finds-chatgpt-boosts-worker-productivity-writing-0714] put 453 white-collar workers through writing tests. The results were clean: the group using ChatGPT finished writing 40% faster and produced 18% higher quality output. The full paper is in Science [Source: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adh2586].
This isn’t marketing spin — it’s a controlled experiment.
But there’s a detail that’s often glossed over in that study — participants were given ChatGPT-3.5, which is generations behind today’s Claude, GPT-5, and Gemini 2.5. If the 2023 version could already speed up writing by 40%, the real benefits in 2026 are only bigger.
The McKinsey 2025 report adds another angle: the time for new businesses to reach significant revenue dropped from 38 months in 2023 to 31 months in 2025 [Source: https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/where-ai-will-create-value-and-where-it-wont]. That’s a seven-month difference in just two years.
The tools actually work.
So Why Can’t 90% of Companies Get Any Value?
This is where it gets really interesting.
McKinsey’s conclusion is actually counter-intuitive — “AI’s productivity benefits come from redesigning workflows, not just adding AI to existing ones” [Source: https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/tech-and-ai/our-insights/superagency-in-the-workplace-empowering-people-to-unlock-ais-full-potential-at-work].
Here’s what that means. If you just plug ChatGPT into your existing “draft → edit → publish” flow, the improvement is limited. But if you redesign the whole flow into “AI drafts → human only checks viewpoints and accuracy → edits tone → publish,” that’s where the 40% comes from.
Big companies can’t do workflow redesign because they’d need to coordinate dozens of departments, change SOPs, train people, and navigate office politics.
That’s where solopreneurs have the edge — nobody’s in your way. You can redesign the entire flow yourself. McKinsey put it well in that report: “Solopreneurs have the most opportunity and the least bureaucracy.”
But Tools Won’t Tell You One Thing
What tools can help with is making already-clear things faster. What they can’t help with is “figuring out what you actually want” in the first place.
A lot of solopreneurs get stuck in this loop: subscribe to five AI tools, try each one superficially, and end up with the conclusion that “AI doesn’t work.”
The problem isn’t the tool — it’s not thinking it through first. What do you want to keep as the thing only you can do? That’s what should go to AI.
If you get the order wrong, no tool, no matter how powerful, can save you.
Three Criteria for Solopreneurs
Wrapping up, here are three points to consider.
First, design the workflow first, then pick the tool. If you can’t even list what you do every day right now, buying more AI subscriptions just becomes a collection.
Second, go deep on one or two tools, don’t just sample everything. That 40% improvement from MIT came with a caveat — users were proficient enough to have back-and-forth conversations with ChatGPT, refine prompts, and knew what it was good at. First-time users typically only get 5-10% improvement.
Third, preserve the work only you can do. AI saves you time, but what you do with that saved time is what determines whether it’s worth it. If AI saves you two hours on copywriting and you spend those two hours writing more copy, that time didn’t really count.
Those 94% of companies not seeing value? Most of them tripped on the third one.
Tools work. But whether you’re using them meaningfully is a whole different question.