Antonio Castro on putting enterprise data to work in the age of AI
The second edition of Rewired offers a practical blueprint for organizations with bold ambitions to unlock value from tech transformations. This series explores the six core capabilities of the Rewired recipe and the people who bring them to life.
AI is making powerful technology easier to build—and less of a differentiator. So where can companies find a competitive advantage?
McKinsey Partner Antonio Castro—a contributor to the second edition of Rewired—argues that the new edge is hiding in plain sight: companies’ own data and institutional knowledge.
Drawing on Rewired and a 30-year career spanning consulting, technology, data management, and transformation, Castro explores how AI is changing what companies need from their data and what it takes to rewire around it.
Moving data from reporting to decisions
For Castro, one of the biggest shifts in the second edition of Rewired is what companies now need their data to do.
“Every model and agent you build needs reliable, accessible, clearly defined, and organized data,” he says. “AI has raised the value of data, but it has also raised the standard.”
The challenge is that many corporate data systems were designed for backward-looking reporting, rather than to support AI in day-to-day operations. “That data won’t automatically fit the agents that you’ll use to make decisions,” says Castro.
AI has raised the value of data, but it has also raised the standard.
That doesn’t mean companies should embark on a wholesale effort to fix their data. Castro recommends starting with the business problem and working backward: Which decisions need to change? What data does AI need to support them? And what needs to improve to make that data usable?
Successfully putting AI into daily operations requires more than getting the technology and data right.
“The operating model still matters as much as the platform,” Castro says. Questions about who owns the data, who manages risk, and who is accountable for outcomes become more consequential as AI moves from analyzing the business to acting within it.
“Human oversight is core to whether you can safely use AI to make decisions,” says Castro.
Building a career in rewiring
Castro’s career in transformation began in the late 1990s, when his background in large-scale numerical computing took him into consulting, where he helped bring companies online for the first time.
He went on to work in financial services, using data to inform pricing and trading, before eventually leading global data management at a major financial institution. Later, at fintech and data start-ups, he built analytics and AI models before returning to consulting.
“I missed being pushed to tackle new situations,” he says. “At McKinsey, we run toward hard problems where organizations are trying to build and scale something that hasn’t been done before yet has enormous potential for impact.”
Today, he helps companies reimagine major functions with technology and bring their visions to life. “What I really enjoy is moving beyond the strategy, building the first versions alongside clients, and helping them develop the skills to take the transformation further.”
Redesigning work, role by role
Castro’s first step in rewiring is to ask, “What if we started with a blank sheet of paper and designed the organization with today’s digital capabilities?”
Finding the answer can take some experimentation. AI is creating new ways to draw on years of on-the-job expertise, changing roles in ways that aren’t always easy to anticipate.
“We’re still learning,” Castro says. “You don’t actually know what the change will be until people do the job, and then you adjust. It takes deliberate design, role by role, to understand what’s changing and how you can support them.”
You don’t actually know what the change will be until people do the job, and then you adjust.
Despite the ways AI is reshaping work, Castro still sees an organization’s accumulated knowledge and experience as an enduring advantage. “The hardest moat for anybody to replicate is the insight, depth, and experience built up inside an established organization,” he says. “The importance of harvesting and protecting that is still paramount.”
This blog post was written by Bryce Stewart, an editor in McKinsey’s Munich office.
