McKinsey: Treat AI as a Business Strategy, Not a Technology Upgrade, or Commercial Teams Won't Change

“Treat AI as a business strategy, not a technology upgrade” is Monique Buch’s central instruction to other commercial leaders, and the Covestro chief commercial officer’s own self-assessment is the evidence for why that distinction matters: she rates her organization’s AI maturity at 5-6 out of 10, with promising pilot use cases but real difficulty scaling them across the business. In McKinsey’s interview, Buch argues AI’s biggest near-term impact on B2B commercial teams isn’t replacement — it’s better decision-making through deeper customer insight, improved forecasting, dynamic pricing, and earlier opportunity identification at a scale manual processes can’t match. She lays out three required operating-model shifts: moving from functional silos to cross-functional teams, adopting hybrid “T-shaped” roles blending customer skills with data literacy, and building shared data platforms — with the closing lesson that transformation should start from a real business problem, not the technology itself.

The scaling gap Buch describes in her own pilots-to-production struggle has a number attached to it elsewhere. BCG’s CIO/CTO scaling playbook found only 5% of companies are truly “agent-first” in 2026, even though 72% report some combination of production and pilot deployment — nearly identical to the gap Buch is naming at Covestro. BCG’s explanation for why some companies cross that gap and most don’t: success is 70% people and change management, only 30% algorithms, with the furthest-along adopters being the ones that trained more than half their workforce.

That statistic reframes what elevating rather than replacing commercial teams actually requires operationally. A revenue-leader roundtable recapped by Outreach’s CMO put it in one line from a participant: “Process and people before technology” — the same teams cited (Renaissance Learning, ServiceNow, Databricks) saw their biggest gains not from broad rollouts but from previously neglected segments: long-tail accounts, underserved territories, churned customers. Buch’s 5-6 out of 10 isn’t a low score for a company taking AI seriously — by BCG’s numbers, it may just be an honest one.