AI: From Pilots to P&L

This episode of Money Majlis dives into how banks and regulators can finally break out of “pilot purgatory” and turn AI from hype into hard P&L impact, with one of the world’s most influential applied AI leaders, Alexander Sukharevsky, CEO of QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey.

Drawing on his global work with financial institutions, sovereigns and regulators, Alexander explains why 88 percent of organisations say they use AI yet only a tiny fraction see more than 20 percent EBITDA uplift, and what it really takes to move that needle.

Across our conversation, Alexander lays out a concrete playbook for banks: focus on a few high value domains instead of scattered use cases, reinvent customer journeys and legacy processes end to end, and build the “human stack” of leaders and bankers who can speak the language of AI without needing to be data scientists. We unpack lessons from Rewired 2.0, his updated McKinsey playbook on how leading firms win with technology, and go inside case studies like DBS to show how a traditional bank can become a data driven, AI ready organisation without derailing business as usual performance.