What McKinsey's State of AI 2026 Means for Italian Business
Italian companies are adopting AI faster than ever. The harder part is turning that adoption into money.
Italian businesses have been closing the AI gap quickly. According to Istat, the share of Italian companies with at least 10 employees using at least one AI technology doubled in a single year, from 8.2% in 2024 to 16.4% in 2025. In 2023 it was just 5%. The Politecnico di Milano's Artificial Intelligence Observatory puts the size of the Italian AI market at €1.8 billion in 2025, up 50% from the year before.
 |
| The author: working as Digital Learning Coach in Italy |
Adoption, though, is only the first step. McKinsey's latest global survey, The State of AI in 2026: On the Road to ROI, is built on 1,719 respondents in 97 countries. Its central message matters to every Italian board: AI use is spreading quickly, but bottom-line impact is not keeping up.
Below are the report's main findings and what they mean for Italy's economy, which runs on manufacturing and SMEs.
1. Large companies are moving ahead, and Italy's SMEs risk falling behind
McKinsey finds that the gap between large and small companies is widening. Among organisations with more than $1 billion in annual revenue, the share scaling AI agents rose from 27% to 40% in one year. Among smaller organisations it stayed flat at 22%. Overall, 54% of large-company respondents say AI is scaling across their enterprise, compared with one-third of smaller firms.
This should worry Italy, where SMEs are the backbone of the economy. Istat's data show the same split at home: 53.1% of Italian companies with more than 250 employees use AI, against 15.7% of SMEs. The national average of 16.4% is also below the EU-27 figure of 20%, and there is a clear North–South divide (19.3% in the North-West against 12.2% in the South).
Diagram 1: The size gap, globally and in Italy
SCALING AI AGENTS (McKinsey global survey, 2026)
Large orgs (≥$1B revenue) ████████████████████ 40% (27% in 2025)
Smaller orgs ███████████ 22% (22% in 2025)
USING ANY AI TECHNOLOGY (Istat, Italy, 2025)
Large firms (250+ empl.) ██████████████████████████▌ 53.1%
SMEs (10–249 empl.) ███████▊ 15.7%
Italy average ████████▏ 16.4%
EU-27 average ██████████ 20.0%
Note: the two sources measure different things (scaling agents vs. any AI use). The pattern of large firms pulling ahead is the same in both.
What this means for Italy: AI could widen the productivity gap between Italian large firms and the SMEs in their supply chains. Industrial districts, trade associations and supply-chain leaders can help here by sharing infrastructure, skills and proven use cases with smaller partners.
2. "Build vs buy" is being rethought, which fits Italian industrial culture
One of the newest findings is how coding agents are changing technology budgets. About two in ten organisations are scaling software coding agents, rising to 31% at large enterprises. Nearly a third of respondents (32%) say their organisations decided against buying at least one software product or feature because they could build it in-house with agentic coding tools. Among AI high performers the figure is nearly half.
