McKinsey just published its Global Tech Agenda 2026 — 632 executives, 69 countries, a dive in to what separates high-growth companies from everyone else.

The headline everyone will talk about: AI is now the #1 technology investment, ahead of cybersecurity and infrastructure modernization. Because half of all companies say so.

Skip it. It's true and it's useless. Nobody changes a decision because of it.

Here's the number that should stop you. In the talent section, almost as a footnote: nearly half of top performers are pulling strategic technology work back in-house. About 40% of everyone else is sending more of it out.

That’s some information worth exploring.

"Great. Insource. We can't hire forty engineers. Next article."

That’s the wrong conclusion. The variable isn't headcount, it’s who are you paying to learn?

Every hour of technology work you pay for deposits capability somewhere. In your building, or in someone else's. Most mid-market contracts are written so it's someone else's, by design, because that's how the relationship stays sticky.

So don't ask what you're spending. Ask a harder question: pull up your three largest technology relationships and tell me who on your payroll got smarter this year.

If the answer is nobody, you're not buying leverage. You're renting it.

I own a technology consulting firm. That question is bad for my competitors. But it’s not bad for me, why?

Because I aligned my mission to support my mid-market companies to grow through the “messy middle”. You know, the growth stage where mid-market companies finally understand they need technology strategy, but aren’t big enough yet to afford a full team.

My goal, is to help them through it and “graduate” them to the next level. Independence.

I can only promise that result if I am helping my clients build capability within their organizations’. For my competitors, their clients’ growth looks like a threat.

1. If change management is your bottleneck, you're winning.

Top performers cite change management as a barrier to scaling AI at roughly 25%. Everyone else: 15%.

That’s counterintuitive. The laggards aren't better at adoption. They haven't deployed anything that’s worthy of production yet.

So if your leadership team is still debating which tool to pick, you are not ahead of the adoption problem. You just haven't reached it. Hitting resistance means something actually shipped.

2. Continuous planning is a mid-market advantage — and most of us throw it away.

The report treats iterative business-and-technology planning as a major achievement. Nearly half of top performers now do it, up from 18%. At enterprise scale that takes a multi-year reorganization.

At 150 people, your CEO and the person who owns technology can sit in the same room every Tuesday and align the business and technology needs.

Instead, most mid-market companies try to act like an enterprise: annual IT budget, once-a-year capital request, quarterly reports. You inherited a ritual built for a company fifty times your size, and it is costing you the only structural edge you have.

Here are 3 questions to ask yourself, no high-paid consultant required.

You should derive a plan that allows your spending to increase your capability. You need to be developing knowledge within your walls and building processes that can be easily adopted when your internal capacity grows.

The subtext in this McKinsey report highlighted what the winning companies are doing and it’s way more than just deploying AI.

Until next week,

—Jared

Text Me: 314.806.3912

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