However, global research in recent years allows us to look at this question much more concretely.
Technologically stronger companies are associated in various studies with 20–60% faster revenue growth, higher profit margins, increased productivity, and significantly shorter time required to implement changes. In some studies, the difference between digital leaders and lagging companies reaches nearly double the profitability.
This is not a single study or the conclusion of one consulting firm. Similar trends are shown by analyses from MIT, McKinsey, Accenture, Deloitte, BCG, OECD, EIB, and other organizations, covering thousands of companies across different countries and sectors.
The numbers, of course, don't mean that a new system will automatically increase revenue by 30 or 50 percent. However, they quite clearly demonstrate something else: an organization's technological capability is already linked not only to IT efficiency, but also to how fast the business grows, how much it earns, and how quickly it can adapt.
In this article, we review what the largest global studies show about this.
The digital maturity gap is already visible in financial reports
One of the more comprehensive studies was conducted by MIT Center for Information Systems Research. Researchers analyzed 1,311 companies from different countries around the worldand assessed how prepared they are to operate as a digital business.
Only 22% of companies MIT priskyrė vadinamajai „future ready“ kategorijai. Tai įmonės, kurios ne tik naudoja technologijas, bet yra pertvarkiusios veiklos procesus, klientų patirtį ir organizacijos gebėjimą naudoti skaitmenines galimybes.
The financial difference was significant. The average revenue growth of these companies was 17.3 percentage points higher than their sector average, and the net profit margin was as much as 14 percentage points higher.
The study does not speak about the return on implementing a single system - it shows the connection between an organization's overall digital readiness and financial results.
A similar trend is shown by an Accenture analysis of 1,500 companies from 10 countries and 19 sectors.
Companies whose technology foundation Accenture ranked in the top quartile of their sector demonstrated 20% faster revenue growth and 30% higher profitability. However, an even more pronounced difference emerged between companies that simultaneously had a strong technology foundation, consistently increased investments in innovation, and managed accumulated technical debt.
Their revenue growth rate was 60% higher: on average 11.1% instead of 7.1%. Profitability was approximately 40% higher, and the average EBITDA margin reached approximately 19.4% instead of 14.2%.
Most interestingly, only 3% of analyzed companies.
McKinsey: up to 35% faster revenue growth and 10% higher margin
McKinsey analyzed technological maturity based on 58 different indicators, covering architecture, infrastructure, data, AI, software development, processes, organization, and competencies.
The study included 158 CIOs and CTOs from Asia, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and the Americas, representing banking, energy, insurance, telecommunications, consumer sector, logistics, and other industries.
The result is similar again.
Companies in the highest quartile of technological maturity had up to 35% faster revenue growth and up to 10% higher profit margins.
McKinsey also calculated that in an average company, improving IT productivity can free up or enable more efficient use of approximately 30% of the technology budget.
However, the study revealed another interesting finding. One of the strongest indicators of a technology organization's profitability was not the number of technologies used, but the speed at which the company can implement changes.
In more advanced organizations, a medium-sized change, such as a new product feature or pricing logic modification, often required 2–4 months. In less advanced organizations, a similar change could have taken up to a year.
This illustrates well why it's difficult to measure the impact of technology on business solely by employee hours saved. The ability to change pricing faster, launch a new service, automate a process, or adapt to customer needs can have a much greater impact than the direct efficiency of system usage.
MIT: The strongest companies are already competing on speed of response
This difference is even more evident in another MIT CISR study.
They surveyed senior executives from 259 companies worldwide, with average annual revenues of approximately USD 10 billion.
MIT tyrėjai vertino vadinamąsias „real-time businesses“, tai yra organizacijas, kuriose svarbiausi procesai yra skaitmenizuoti, sprendimams naudojami aktualūs duomenys, dalis veiksmų automatizuota, o darbuotojai gali greitai priimti duomenimis paremtus sprendimus.
The difference between the highest and lowest quartile was impressive.
The most advanced companies demonstrated:
62% higher revenue growth
97% higher profit margins
22% higher operational efficiency
20% better innovation results
17% better risk management
The essence of this study is not just automation. MIT highlights real-time data accessibility, integrated customer experience, organizational agility, and employees' ability to act based on the same data.
In other words, the value of digitalization emerges when the distance between what happened in the business and when the organization can respond to it is shortened.
The impact on productivity is also seen by economists
Consulting firm studies often rely on executive surveys or company classifications by digital maturity, so their results should be viewed as strong correlations rather than a guarantee that a specific technology investment will automatically produce the same result.
However, the impact on productivity is also shown by econometric studies.
The OECD, analyzing European company data, found that a 10 percentage point increase in high-speed internet usage in a sector was associated with 1.4% higher multifactor productivity for the average company after just one year and 3.9% after three years.
In the case of cloud technologies, a similar 10 percentage point increase in usage was associated with approximately 0.9% productivity growth after one year and 2.3% after three years.
The OECD calculated that the observed pace of various digital technology adoption could theoretically increase the average company's multifactor productivity by approximately 1% per year, although the organization itself emphasizes that this is most likely an upper bound of the impact and the entire effect cannot be considered directly causal.
Newer research is beginning to show the impact of AI as well.
A study by the European Investment Bank analyzed data from more than 12,000 non-financial sector companies from the European Union and the US. Researchers found that AI use in European companies was on average associated with approximately 4% higher labor productivity.
Importantly, productivity growth in the short term was not associated with a reduction in the number of employees. The greatest benefits were seen in medium and large companies that simultaneously invested in software, data, and employee competencies.
Digitalization creates not only efficiency but also new revenue
For a long time, technology projects were based mainly on efficiency: how much manual work would be reduced, how many processes would be automated, and how many working hours would be saved.
However, in more mature organizations, technology is increasingly becoming a revenue growth infrastructure.
Deloitte 1,200 large organizations study found that companies with high digital maturity were approximately three times more likely than low-maturity companies to be among those that significantly outperformed their sector average in terms of revenue growth and net profit margin.
There was also a difference in where companies saw the benefits of technology.
Organizations with lower digital maturity more often emphasized cost reduction and efficiency. Higher maturity companies more often associated technology with sales growth, new products, higher customer value, and innovation.
For example, digitally connected products were offered by 58% of high maturity organizations, compared to 33% of medium maturity and only 17% of low maturity companies.
In Deloitte's analysis, data management and smarter work processes together explained about half of the observed impact on efficiency, revenue growth, product quality, customer satisfaction, and employee engagement.
A similar shift is visible in economic statistics.
According to Eurostat, in 2025, 24% of EU companies conducted electronic sales, while a decade ago there were 19%. Electronic sales already accounted for approximately 19% of total EU company turnover. In large companies, this share reached 24%, in small and medium-sized enterprises approximately 12%.
Lithuania ranked first in the European Union by the share of companies conducting electronic sales: they were conducted by approximately 43% of Lithuanian companies.
This is just one area of digitalization, but it illustrates well a broader shift. Technologies are increasingly rarely just internal infrastructure. They are becoming a sales channel, a customer service channel, the foundation for new services, and sometimes the product itself.
However, more technology does not necessarily mean better results
Large numbers have another side.
BCG analyzed 895 companies digital transformations. The study covered 825 executive surveys and BCG's experience working with an additional 70 large organizations worldwide.
Only 30% of transformations achieved or exceeded their intended goals and created sustainable change.
Another 44% created some value but did not achieve all intended results, while 26% created less than half of the planned value and did not generate long-term change.
Together, BCG found that successful digital leaders demonstrated 1.8 times faster profit growth and more than twice as fast total enterprise value growth compared to digital laggards.
It seems paradoxical: digitalization is associated with tremendous potential, yet most transformations still fail to achieve all their goals.
But this is exactly where the results of different studies begin to converge.
The problem is most often not the lack of technology itself.
The biggest difference is created not by technology, but by the ability to use it
OECD research shows that the benefits of digitalization are unevenly distributed among companies. Greater benefits are usually obtained by organizations that already have better management and technological capabilities, appropriate employee competencies, and can change their processes along with technologies.
Accenture arrived at a similar conclusion through a different path. A strong technological foundation was already associated with better results, but the biggest difference emerged when it was combined with continuous investment in innovation and conscious management of legacy systems and technical debt.
MIT research brings together process automation, data, customer experience, and organizational decision-making speed. McKinsey highlights the speed of change implementation and collaboration between business and technology teams. BCG research shows that simply announcing a transformation is still far from creating real value.
Therefore, the impact of digitalization on business is probably inaccurate to measure by how many systems a company has or what share of revenue is allocated to IT.
More important is what that technological infrastructure enables the business to do differently.
Can an order that previously required the actions of several employees be fulfilled automatically? Can a customer perform actions themselves that previously required contacting a manager? Does a manager see today what they previously only learned at the end of the month? Can new pricing be launched in a few weeks rather than a year? Does the available data allow offering a new service or creating a new revenue stream?
It is precisely such changes that ultimately appear in those studies as higher productivity, faster revenue growth, or higher profit margins.
The numbers show potential, not a guarantee
The percentages from different studies cannot simply be added up or interpreted as a promise that investing in digitalization will automatically grow a company's revenue by 35%, 60%, or even more.
Studies analyze different countries, sectors, time periods, and define technological maturity differently. Some of them show correlation, not direct causation. Moreover, financially stronger companies themselves have more capacity to invest in technology.
However, when MIT, McKinsey, Accenture, Deloitte, BCG, OECD, and other organizations consistently find a similar direction using different methods, it becomes difficult to ignore.
Technologically strong organizations not only reduce costs - they change faster, make more decisions based on data, use people's time more efficiently, create a more convenient customer experience, and have more opportunities to use technology to generate new revenue.