Many organizations have moved beyond asking whether AI will change the workplace and are now grappling with a more fundamental question: What will the organization itself look like in an AI-enabled world? As companies deploy AI tools and experiment with agents, leaders are increasingly focused on workforce reinvention, operating-model redesign, and how to translate adoption into measurable business value.
Those themes are central to Rewired, McKinsey’s book on digital and AI transformation. In this “Rewired take”—part of a series exploring how the themes from the book are playing out at companies—McKinsey Partner Julie Goran provides a perspective on how organizations are rewiring how they work, rethinking management, and preparing for the rise of the agentic organization.
Reinventing work to increase growth
To say AI is top of mind is a bit of an understatement. It’s not often that you can reference quotes about AI from Pope Leo, but that’s the world we’re living in. The executives I’m speaking with are grappling with some very fundamental questions when it comes to the implications of AI on people, jobs, and organizations.
That energy is starting to translate into reinventing work, with companies getting much more granular and going down to the task level. They’re trying to identify the activities people will no longer need to do because agents can do them. And what’s exciting is that this thinking is opening up a new strain of creativity. If we can take 40 percent of the tasks off someone’s plate, what becomes possible? What new work can they do? What creativity can they unlock?
I spoke with a technology company whose aspiration is to grow threefold over the next five years while keeping head count flat. That’s not about reducing people. It’s about fundamentally reconfiguring the workforce to support growth in a different way. And this is not an outlier case. Many executives are thinking in terms of what AI can do for growth.
The rise of the agent manager
Some of the questions leaders are grappling with are heralding a real revolution in what organizations look like: Should we put agents on the organization chart? How should organizations think about agent capacity alongside human capacity? What happens to spans and layers? The scale of the potential shift here hasn’t happened since the dawn of the Industrial Age.
That thinking is throwing the role of the manager into stark relief. Earlier operating-model changes like agile or DevOps were already putting a big strain on how managers operate, and AI is exacerbating that. In many organizations, managers were never adequately trained, the number of people they oversaw increased, and they were expected to adopt new methodologies. Now we’re asking them to manage agents as well. That’s something no manager in history has ever had to do before. It represents a fundamental transformation in how management works.
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AI is also driving new team structures, with many teams in technology, for example, starting to become smaller and more productive. The question now is how to take the gains from that operating model that tech teams are pioneering and scale it across the enterprise. Our belief is that these forces mean that organizations will ultimately have fewer layers over time.
Why adoption is only the beginning
Companies are rolling out tools, conducting training programs, and helping employees get comfortable with the technology. That’s an important place to start.
We never thought tool rollouts alone would be enough, yet so much of the focus is still on that. That’s partly because deployment is visible and tangible. But moving from rollout to value creation is much more difficult. That’s where organizations need to focus next.
And the companies creating the most value are doing exactly what Rewired suggests: They’re focusing on the domains that matter most. They’re not trying to transform everything at once. They’re identifying the few areas where AI can create the greatest impact and then doing the hard, focused work of workforce reinvention and workflow redesign.
This is both a top-down and a bottom-up challenge. At the top, leaders need to set the aspiration. They need alignment around where the company is going, what value matters, and what impact they want to create.
But the actual work is highly granular. There’s no magic key. Organizations have to look carefully at what people are doing today, what can be automated, what should be augmented, and what entirely new jobs might emerge.
I recently worked with an insurance company where the most important domains were exactly what you would expect: claims, underwriting, and technology. The real question wasn’t whether AI could help. The question was what underwriting should look like in the future, requiring the company to figure out what people should do, what agents should do, and what activities will disappear entirely.
That work is involved. But the companies willing to do the hard work of reimagining how work gets done, and then redesigning their organizations to match, are the ones that are most likely to succeed.
That’s why workforce redesign is becoming such an important capability in its own right. Companies need methodologies for reimagining work and reimagining workforces. We’re seeing leading technology companies invest heavily in this area. They’re building teams, tools, and methodologies that help business leaders understand tasks, skills, and workforce implications at a much deeper level.
