McKinsey's Ni Yili: Generative AI May Widen the Technology Gap

"The biggest bottleneck in AI development lies in organizational culture."

On September 11, Eddie Wu, Chairman of McKinsey China, stated this at the 2025 Bund Summit.

In his speech titled "From 'World Factory' to 'Global Corporate Citizen'," Eddie Wu made three major judgments—grasping the AI technology dividend requires organizational change, the reconstruction of global trade corridors is accelerating, and Chinese companies are entering a new 3.0 phase of going global.

Over the past 30 years, McKinsey's key experience in strategic consulting in China has been that choosing the right "battlefield" is the most important strategy for enterprises. According to McKinsey's corporate performance analysis tool from 2015 to 2019, the three sectors with the highest average economic profits among companies in the industry are biotechnology, technology hardware, and automotive, which are precisely the industries where AI technology can deliver significant value.

However, in the past decade, only one in twelve companies has been able to leap from the middle tier to a leading position, and only about half of the companies ranked in the top quintile can maintain their leading status. In this regard, Eddie Wu bluntly stated, "If this industry is not the most profitable, industry leaders will only achieve half the results with double the effort."

In recent years, investment interest and innovation input in AI have both seen strong growth. According to Crunchbase News, AI companies received approximately $90 billion in venture capital in the second quarter of 2025. McKinsey's survey shows that 92% of executives plan to increase their investment in AI over the next three years. Additionally, according to Yahoo Finance, in 2025, Meta, Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft plan to invest $325 billion in AI infrastructure, a 46% increase from 2024.

Clearly, AI is empowering all key technological trends, from agents executing complex tasks to driving innovation in specialized semiconductors, accelerating biomanufacturing research and development, and enhancing the adaptability of robots, its catalytic effect spans multiple fields including energy, manufacturing, and scientific research.

It is noteworthy that the bottleneck in AI development does not lie in technology or application scenarios, but in organization and culture. Eddie Wu pointed out that successful AI transformation must be led by the CEO and driven by business rather than the IT department; it needs to focus on profits rather than application scenarios; it must reconstruct processes and organizations rather than simply optimizing them; and it needs to break down organizational barriers and inertia, with the real breakthrough lying in "change management."

Furthermore, Eddie Wu noted that Chinese companies must learn to compete in the new "trade corridors," including emerging markets such as Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Africa; additionally, the "local to local" model is becoming a global phenomenon, and companies should strive to establish a more decentralized and diversified global layout.

Going global has been one of the hottest keywords for Chinese companies in the past two years. In fact, after decades of rapid growth, Chinese companies still primarily focus on the domestic market. According to analysis from the McKinsey Global Institute, the proportion of overseas revenue for Chinese companies was 7% in 2010 and 8% in 2021, far lower than South Korea's 60% and 65%, and also below the levels of Japan and the United States. Moreover, in 2024, only 12 of the top 100 global brands came from China, in stark contrast to the 61 from the United States Ni Yili divides the globalization process of Chinese enterprises into three stages: the 1.0 era relies on low-cost manufacturing and export scale; the 2.0 era is driven by overseas mergers and acquisitions to complete capabilities; the 3.0 era emphasizes achieving sustainable development as global corporate citizens.

This means that Chinese enterprises need to shift from pure export transactions to establishing a global perspective, transitioning from exporting end products to exporting IP, expertise, and capabilities, adopting diversified cooperation models such as joint ventures and minority equity investments, and building international management teams. He stated, "If we can reach this point, Chinese enterprises will have one more avenue and one more growth space."