Hack the Stack #003: Why Only Six Percent of Companies Are Turning AI Into Real Earnings

McKinsey just surveyed over seventeen hundred business leaders worldwide, and the headline number hasn't moved in a year: 37% of companies attribute any EBIT impact to AI, flat versus 2025. Only 6% clear the bar for what the report calls a high performer. This week: what that 6% is doing differently at the data and governance layer. Three engineering teams, Grab, Airbnb, and Booking.com, independently converged on the same fix for data readiness in the same week. And a sharper debate: should AI governance live in the pipeline, or get pushed all the way down into the database itself, where a misbehaving agent physically can't act outside its lane.
Voices in this episode are digitally rendered.
If you're building or scaling AI infrastructure and want to work through a delivery or governance bottleneck, book a call at https://calendar.app.google/YH7SA6Rrs3CbZRaw5, message Vladimir Cvijanovic on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/vladimircvijanovic/), or reach us at podcast@c42.services.