Source page: McKinsey & Company
Commentary
Lighting the way with AI
Artificial Intelligence | Innovation | Manufacturing
February 5, 2026 – The newest sites added to the Global Lighthouse Network, a World Economic Forum initiative cofounded with McKinsey, have embraced enterprise-wide AI deployment. The Lighthouse Network, which is in its seventh year of celebrating advances in industrial transformation, has expanded to more than 220 sites across 35 countries and over 30 industries, spanning manufacturing and end-to-end supply chains. Rather than focusing on isolated use cases, the newest Lighthouses embed analytical AI, gen AI, and agentic AI across end-to-end operations—supporting core decisions, workflows, and frontline execution, according to McKinsey’s Dinu de Kroon, Rahul Shahani, Ruth Heuss, and coauthors. Click through the interactive to read more.
Interactive
To read the article, see “The continuing evolution of the Global Lighthouse Network,” January 20, 2026.
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Visual form
Map.
Layout / body structure
The visual is laid out as a dashboard-style layout with a world map as the main body and site details opening in an adjacent pop-up panel. The reading order runs from the map view first, then into the selected site panel, where the operating story and designation fields are listed in a fixed sequence.
What is being compared
It compares Lighthouse sites across countries, industries, and subsectors, showing how AI-enabled industrial transformation is distributed across the network rather than concentrated in one geography or one manufacturing niche. At the site level, the panel compares individual company locations and the kinds of designations or change stories attached to each one.
Measurement system
The map uses geographic position as the primary coordinate system and categorical color to distinguish industry groups. The labels and panel fields track company name, location, industry, subsector, and designation categories such as productivity, supply-chain resilience, sustainability, talent, and customer-centricity, while the surrounding page text anchors the network at more than 220 sites across 35 countries and over 30 industries.
Visible structure inside the graphic
The main organizing pieces are the world map, colored site markers, a legend keyed to industry categories, control buttons and dropdowns, and a custom information panel that opens with a company header and then lists industry, location, subsector, designation fields, and a longer Lighthouse change story. That structure makes the visual work as both a network overview and a site-by-site inspection tool.
Main takeaway from the visual
The map shows that enterprise-wide AI adoption is being represented as a broad global manufacturing footprint, with Lighthouse examples spread across many countries and industry groups rather than as a single isolated cluster. The emphasis is on scale, distribution, and site-level transformation stories that link AI deployment to real operating environments.
Key standout values or extremes
The standout numeric anchors visible from the page text are the network’s scale of more than 220 sites, its reach across 35 countries, and its span of more than 30 industries. The site panel content also highlights concrete operating gains for individual locations, turning the map into a collection of measured Lighthouse examples rather than a purely symbolic geography view.
Controls / sequence, when applicable
The visible controls change the chart view while keeping the same graphic structure.
Companion media, when applicable
There is no separate companion audio or video; the chart is the full visual on this page.