> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.trentcotton.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Is Your AI Strategy Only a Cost Play? The Five Mindsets Test - URL: https://www.trentcotton.com/is-your-ai-strategy-only-a-cost-play-the-five-mindsets-test/ - Published: 2026-10-07T21:20:46.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-07T21:20:45.000Z - Description: About 80 percent of survey respondents say their organizations chase AI efficiency, high performers included. Here's what McKinsey's top group does beyond savings, and what to ask your HR leader. - Author: Trent Cotton - Tags: FutHRist, AI in HR ## TL;DR If savings are the whole case, you're running the same play as everyone else. In McKinsey's 2026 State of AI survey, about 80 percent of both AI high performers and other respondents say their organizations are pursuing efficiency gains. Efficiency shows up equally in both groups, so it can't be what sets the high performers apart. **Key stats you need to know:** - About 80 percent of both high performers and other respondents say their organizations are pursuing efficiency gains from AI (McKinsey, "The state of AI in 2026: On the road to ROI," August 25, 2026). - High performers are 3.3 times more likely than others to intend to use AI to fundamentally transform their business within the next three years (McKinsey, "The state of AI in 2026: On the road to ROI," August 25, 2026). - AI high performers account for 6 percent of survey respondents (McKinsey, "The state of AI in 2026: On the road to ROI," August 25, 2026). **The leadership takeaway:** Over the next 12 to 24 months, leadership teams that fund AI for growth and efficiency together will be building what McKinsey's high performers already report doing. --- There's been a lot of data reporting over the last four weeks and I have been hardly keeping up. One I do want to get into gets to the meat of the whole AI vs workforce discussion. [McKinsey & Company](https://www.linkedin.com/company/mckinsey/?ref=trentcotton.com) published "[The state of AI in 2026: On the road to ROI](https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights/the-state-of-ai?ref=trentcotton.com)" on August 25, 2026\. **The survey of 1,719 participants in 97 nations found that 37 percent of respondents attribute at least some EBIT impact to AI use. That's about the same share as last year.** I've sat in a leadership meeting where the room could hear one word, and the word was costs. It took nine months to prove there was more on the table. I would bet a paycheck the popular read of the McKinsey survey is that AI isn't paying off yet. *I read it differently.* Nearly everyone is asking AI for savings. A small group is asking for more, and the Five Mindsets from *T*[*he FutHRist: 5 Mindsets of the Future HR Pro*](https://a.co/d/04Mo7uBy?ref=trentcotton.com) show what "more" looks like inside a business. ### What did McKinsey's 2026 State of AI survey find about AI objectives? > McKinsey's 2026 State of AI survey found that efficiency is a near-universal AI objective and that high performers aim past it. About 80% of both high performers and other respondents say their organizations are pursuing efficiency gains. Most high performers also report using AI to pursue growth, innovation, or both. McKinsey defines AI high performers as respondents who attribute an EBIT impact of 5 percent or more to AI use and say their organizations have seen "significant" value. They account for 6 percent of survey respondents. That group differs in two more ways. High performers are 3.3 times more likely than others to intend to use AI to fundamentally transform their business within the next three years. Nearly three-quarters of high performers report fundamentally redesigning workflows because of AI, up from 55 percent last year. One-quarter of other respondents report doing so. Here's what the data doesn't show. McKinsey doesn't claim that a growth objective causes higher returns. The survey reports what respondents say about their organizations. It's a pattern worth testing in your own business, and it stops short of proof. ### What happened when a leadership team could only hear the word cost? A leadership team I supported tried to solve a revenue miss with one lever, and it rejected a second lever because the second one looked like an expense. I was eight months into my first HR job, and I'd spent the first part of my career running a P&L. Finance had walked through the numbers. One region was struggling and revenue was down. Operations gave its update, and it was obvious the team was running with severe inefficiencies. The sales leaders had an answer ready. "We will just add more salespeople." I asked why they thought that would work. The reply came fast. "*You are in HR. I can see why you do not get this.*" After I took a deep breath to calm my tongue, I reminded them I was new to HR but not new to business. They were treating the problem as binary. So I kept driving the room back to a basic reality: *multiple things can be true at once*. Revenue matters. Margin matters. Risk matters. Leakage matters. New revenue means nothing if the business can't retain and convert what's already in motion. Then I pushed for outside support to audit the operation. That got resistance right away, because people only heard the word "cost." I kept reframing it as an investment. If the business is leaking value, fixing the leak is the primary lever of value creation. I proposed a crawl, walk, run strategy. **Crawl**: hire salespeople in batches instead of all at once. **Walk**: audit the operation to find out whether the drag came from people, process, or technology. **Run**: scale only after the back end of the business could support the front end. We did the work over nine brutal months. The audit found a technology gap and a staffing and structure issue. Close rates went up and average deal quality improved. Customer complaints about delays fell off. Revenue climbed again, and the growth was durable because the machine behind it could support the demand. When I read the headlines today, I wonder how many conversations around workforce redesign take a moment to pause and do the hard research to make sure the plan is sound? ### What are the Five Mindsets, and why do they matter here? The Five Mindsets are the Architect, the Engineer, the Scientist, the CEO, and the Coach, a framework from *The FutHRist: 5 Mindsets of the Future HR Pro* for how HR leaders should think about work. Each mindset turns a cost question into a value question. Here's what each one asks of an AI plan, and what you should ask your HR leader. 0:00 /0:05 1× - **The Architect** asks what the organization is built to produce before touching the org chart. McKinsey reports that high performers are 3.3 times more likely than others to intend to use AI to fundamentally transform their business within three years. Ask your HR leader: what will this business produce in three years that it can't produce today? - **The Engineer** obsesses over the handoffs, because that's where ownership goes blurry. Nearly three-quarters of high performers report fundamentally redesigning workflows, against one-quarter of other respondents. Ask your HR leader: which workflows did we redesign, and which ones only got a new tool? - **The Scientist** asks whether a metric predicts a business outcome or is easy to count. Savings are easy to count. In McKinsey's survey, 37 percent of respondents attribute at least some EBIT impact to AI use, about the same share as last year. Ask your HR leader: which of our AI measures predicts revenue? - **The CEO** runs every function through the Value of Work Matrix, a tool from *The FutHRist* that plots work on two axes: value to the organization and the human judgment it requires. About 80 percent of both groups in McKinsey's survey are pursuing efficiency. Ask your HR leader: where is the high-value, high-judgment work that deserves more investment? - **The Coach** has the hard conversation, backed by data, before the cut. In my meeting, that conversation started with a question nobody wanted asked. Ask your HR leader: where is our AI plan solving the wrong problem? ### How should C-suite leaders respond? C-suite leaders should require every AI business case to carry a growth argument next to its savings argument, and they should hold their HR leader accountable for the people side of both. A case built on savings alone has a ceiling. Five actions follow, one per mindset. 1. **Write the growth case next to the savings case.** If the plan can't say what the business will do that it couldn't do before, it's a budget cut with new software. [The AI Fire Drill Era: Why CHROs Need an Architect Mindset](https://www.trentcotton.com/the-ai-fire-drill-era-why-chros-need-an-architect-mindset/) covers how to frame it. 2. **Fund the redesign and expect it to be slow.** My audit took nine months, and the first gains were slight. Start where work changes hands, which I cover in [Your HR Problem Is Hiding at the Handoff](https://www.trentcotton.com/your-hr-problem-is-hiding-at-the-handoff/). 3. **Put a revenue-side measure on every AI initiative.** Close rates and deal quality told my leadership team more than activity counts did. [Where Did AI's Productivity Gains Go?](https://www.trentcotton.com/where-did-ais-productivity-gains-go-3-answers-chros-need-in-2026/) explains what to track. 4. **Treat fixing a leak as an investment.** The audit my colleagues called a cost is what made the next year's growth hold. Budget it that way. 5. **Ask your HR leader where the plan is solving the wrong problem.** If you don't get a direct answer, raise the bar for that chair. [The Five Mindsets Every Modern CHRO Needs](https://www.trentcotton.com/the-five-mindsets-every-modern-chro-needs-and-why-most-leaders-only-have-one-or-two/) describes the leader you should expect, and [Is AI the Threat to HR, or Our Refusal to Change?](https://www.trentcotton.com/is-ai-the-threat-to-hr-or-our-refusal-to-change/) explains why many aren't there yet. ### What this means for you as a leader The tension is certainty against upside. Savings are near and countable. Growth is further out and harder to prove. A leadership team under pressure picks the countable thing every time. Leaders who stop at savings get a result they can report this quarter and a plan with nowhere to go next year. Leaders who run both cases get a slower start and a business that can carry more demand. I watched that second path play out. The real signal was the division executive. In early meetings his instinct was to jump straight to headcount and activity. Months later, his first question sounded different. > "Is that a symptom or the root problem we need to solve?" We didn't hit 100 percent of the target that year. We blew it out of the water the next. That experience taught me the job of a CHRO: make strategy better before the business commits to it. Your AI plan is the next place to ask for that. Find out what FutHRist mindsets you have with this free assessment: --- ### Resources for HR Leaders If you found this useful, here's what I've built for HR executives dealing with the same challenges. - [**The FutHRist Planner (Free)**](https://cottontrent.gumroad.com/l/futhrist-productivity-planner?ref=trentcotton.com): A planning tool for HR leaders navigating AI-driven transformation. - [**AI Ethics in Recruiting (Free)**](https://cottontrent.gumroad.com/l/AIEthicsinRecruiting?ref=trentcotton.com): A framework to evaluate AI risk in your hiring stack. - [**FutHRist Team Assessment Workbook**](https://cottontrent.gumroad.com/l/futhrist-team-workbook?ref=trentcotton.com): Diagnose your team's readiness for the future of work. - [**The Value of Work Matrix Toolkit**](https://cottontrent.gumroad.com/l/value-of-work-matrix-toolkit?ref=trentcotton.com): Quantify workforce decisions and defend your seat at the table. - [**Sprint Recruiting Bootcamp**](https://cottontrent.gumroad.com/l/sprint-recruiting?ref=trentcotton.com): Cut time-to-fill without cutting quality. - [**FutHRist Team Workshop Kit**](https://cottontrent.gumroad.com/l/futhrist-team-kit?ref=trentcotton.com): Run a future-of-work strategy session with your HR team. --- ### FAQ **What did McKinsey's 2026 State of AI survey find about AI objectives?** McKinsey's 2026 State of AI survey found that about 80 percent of both AI high performers and other respondents say their organizations are pursuing efficiency gains from AI. Most high performers also report using AI to pursue growth, innovation, or both. **Is cutting costs with AI enough to become a high performer?** McKinsey's data doesn't support that. About 80 percent of both high performers and other respondents pursue efficiency, so efficiency alone doesn't distinguish the two groups. McKinsey doesn't claim that a growth objective causes higher returns. **Who are McKinsey's AI high performers?** McKinsey defines AI high performers as respondents who attribute an EBIT impact of 5 percent or more to AI use and say their organizations have seen significant value. They account for 6 percent of respondents in the 2026 State of AI survey. **What are the Five Mindsets?** The Five Mindsets are the Architect, the Engineer, the Scientist, the CEO, and the Coach, a framework from The FutHRist: 5 Mindsets of the Future HR Pro for how HR leaders should think about work. **What is the Value of Work Matrix?** The Value of Work Matrix is a tool from The FutHRist that plots work on two axes: value to the organization and the human judgment it requires. **What is the first action for CHROs?** CHROs should take the company's AI business case and write the growth argument next to the savings argument, then bring both to the leadership team before the next funding decision. ### Sources 1. McKinsey & Company, "The state of AI in 2026: On the road to ROI," August 25, 2026, [https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights/the-state-of-ai](https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights/the-state-of-ai?ref=trentcotton.com)