Tanguy Catlin on finding strategic focus in the AI era
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 for the Rewired recipe and the people who bring them to life.
Since the first edition of Rewired was published in 2023, the pace and potential of AI have accelerated dramatically, yet the recipe for transforming organizations has remained the same.
Drawing on insights from more than 200 enterprise-wide tech and AI transformations globally, the second edition of Rewired brings this recipe to life with real-world examples of companies that have achieved transformative results.
We spoke with Tanguy Catlin, a McKinsey senior partner and contributor to the book, about how leading companies are sharpening their tech strategies.
Choosing where to win with AI
For Tanguy, a key shift since the first edition of Rewired is how companies are embracing transformation with greater urgency. “The strategic importance of rewiring the organization through AI is greater today than when we first released the book,” he says. “It’s a topic whose relevance and importance have increased dramatically.”
At the same time, focus has become critical. While many organizations have pursued broad, enterprise-wide AI deployments, McKinsey has consistently advocated for a more targeted strategy—a point now reinforced by new data in Rewired showing that leading companies start their journeys with a focus on just one to three domains.
“Organizations are learning they can’t do everything,” Tanguy says. “They need to choose where to be truly distinctive—where AI will drive the greatest value—and go deep. To capture value, you have to redesign processes first and then enable them through technology.”
Tanguy’s perspective is shaped by decades of work at the intersection of strategy, technology, and operations. He began his career as an engineer at Procter & Gamble, building plants, managing supply chains, and developing products, including innovations still widely used today, such as water-soluble pouches for dishwashers and laundry. After earning an MBA from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he joined McKinsey’s Boston office and began working with insurance clients, an industry he has focused on ever since.
“I fell in love with the societal role of insurance,” he says. “It enables people to take risks and recover from setbacks, and it supports investment across the economy.”
Over the years, he has built deep, long-standing relationships with clients, often working with the same organizations for decades. “The ability to understand organizations really deeply, build trusted relationships with senior leaders, and help shape their agenda and raise their ambition for what’s possible—that’s my passion,” he says. “And increasingly, it’s about supporting the implementation of those ideas to deliver real impact.”
Today, he partners with financial-services organizations to drive analytics transformations, reinvent business models, and modernize core technology, while also advising insurance clients on topics ranging from strategy and organization design to culture and change management.
In his new role as a director of the McKinsey Global Institute, Tanguy is also helping shape research on the next era of technological and economic transformation. “What is of interest to me,” he says, “will be the impact that technology will have on geopolitics, on economic growth through productivity, and on the workforce.”
At the same time, he is exploring the core challenges that leaders face: “CEOs are trying to bring together a strategic lens, a technology lens, and a people lens,” he says. The strategic lens focuses on how AI will reshape industries and competition, the technology lens on key investment and build-versus-buy decisions, and the people lens on preparing the workforce to adopt new ways of working. “And they’re all moving at the same time.”
Yet for Tanguy, the strategic mandate for companies is clear: “The organizations that succeed will be the ones that are most adaptable, make smart choices about where to play, and then bring their leadership teams and their people along to actually deliver that change,” he says.
Ultimately, while strategy and technology are essential, the real challenge lies in execution. “Change management is the hardest part,” he says. “It’s about going beyond the technical components to truly align the organization and make the transformation stick.”
