McKinsey and Cursor have announced a collaboration to help organizations move past engineering capacity bottlenecks and achieve scaled, sustainable agentic software development. McKinsey has been named a Cursor Benchmark Partner for transformation and adoption.
As organizations seek to build software to innovate, they face challenges in securing technical capacity and rewiring their organizations to adopt change.
McKinsey and Cursor’s collaboration brings a unique pairing of capabilities to the market. Together, the organizations address the full agentic product and software development life cycles (PDLC and SDLC)—from strategy and workflow redesign through capability building, production deployment, and performance measurement. Cursor is a cutting-edge agentic development platform, and McKinsey rewires the broader product development system around it so adoption can translate into measurable enterprise value.
Specifically, McKinsey is building proprietary skills and agents that are iterated and improved through multiple client deployments on Cursor’s platform that we will use to accelerate time to impact for our clients, as well as creating a distinctive benchmarking capability that will leverage McKinsey’s connection to business value and Cursor’s telemetry of software and development metrics.
“Cursor can accelerate what an individual developer does. The larger opportunity is to reshape how the entire enterprise builds software,” says Martin Harrysson, a senior partner in McKinsey’s Technology, Media & Telecommunications Practice. “Our unique joint approach combines deep product and engineering expertise with the operating model, capability building, and change work required to make those gains durable.”
McKinsey also brings firsthand experience deploying Cursor within its own enterprise. That experience, combined with an established AI-native product development playbook and executable assets, will help joint teams move more quickly from initial adoption to scaled ways of working. Clients can establish a fact base on current performance, identify the workflows where agentic development can create the most value, deploy reusable skills and agents, and track whether the changes are improving delivery performance and business outcomes.
“As a multimodel coding platform, we’ve seen Cursor change the pace and ambition of software development. We’ve noticed customers are the most successful in their ambition when the platform, engineering workflows, and organization evolve together, and that’s where our work with McKinsey delivers the most value for clients,” says Brian McCarthy, president, global revenue and field operations at Cursor.
The collaboration between McKinsey and Cursor enables an integrated effort to engage stakeholders from the CEO and chief information officer to product leaders and developers.
“Business leaders seek to capture value with AI but often end up stuck in pilots. We strive to help organizations move from those isolated areas of small impact to full-scale business value,” says Brendan Gaffey, global coleader of McKinsey’s Technology, Media & Telecommunications Practice. “Our collaboration with Cursor across the full life cycle brings that reality closer for our clients.”
McKinsey believes that innovation thrives in collaboration. In addition to its collaboration with Cursor, the firm works with an array of leading technology providers in our ecosystem to bring clients the best innovation across all dimensions of AI.