In their recent article “How Banks Can Turn AI’s Promise into Real Impact”, McKinsey’s Violet Chung and Larry Lerner argue that many banks are stuck in “pilot purgatory”—testing AI in narrow, low-impact use cases without a plan to scale. While generative AI offers enormous potential (an estimated $340 billion in annual value), most institutions haven’t reimagined business functions like risk, sales and service to fully leverage it. McKinsey urges banks to invest in core AI infrastructure, stand up centralized governance “control towers” and build a full AI capability stack from customer engagement to decision-making and operating models. The message is clear: banks must move from experimentation to enterprise transformation to realize AI’s true business value.
