1、June 2025The next innovation revolutionpowered by AIR&D has been getting more difficult and more expensive.Heres how AI can accelerate the processand usher in a new era of growth.This article is a collaborative effort by Alex Singla,Alexander Sukharevsky,Elia Berteletti,Lareina Yee,and Michael Chui,

2、representing views from QuantumBlack,AI by McKinsey,and McKinseys Operations Practice.The innovation challenge:Good ideas are harder to find Innovation has been the driver of the extraordinary progress from which humankind has benefited for a couple of centuries,but it faces a largely hidden threat:

3、Innovation is becoming harder and more expensive.Innovation is an enabler of human progress Its instructive here to take the long view.For most of recorded human history,improvements in human welfare from generation to generation have been limited.Take,for example,GDP per capita as a measure of econ

4、omic prosperity.For most of human history,roughly until the early 1800s,the measure barely moved to$1,200.But since that time,it has grown by more than 14 times(Exhibit 1).1 Human health has followed a similar trajectorylow for centuries and only significantly improving in recent generations.In 1900

5、,for example,the average life expectancy of a newborn was 32 years.By 2021,this had more than doubled to 71 years.21 Jutta Bolt and Jan Luiten van Zanden,Maddison Project Database 2023;Jutta Bolt and Jan Luiten van Zanden,“Maddison-style estimates of the evolution of the world economy:A new 2023 upd

6、ate,”Journal of Economic Surveys,2024,Volume 39.2 Saloni Dattani et al.,“Life expectancy,”Our World in Data,2023.Exhibit 1Web Exhibit of GDP per capita globally over the past 2,000 years,$thousandsSource:Maddison Project Database version 2023:Jutta Bolt and Jan Luiten van Zanden,“Maddison-style esti