• The collaboration pairs McKinsey’s transformation expertise, including QuantumBlack, with Opus, AppliedAI’s Agentic Process Execution (APX) platform, to deploy governed, auditable workflows in regulated industries.
• A joint deployment with a leading European chemicals manufacturer cut a two-week vendor onboarding process to under five minutes of active processing, with a 99 percent-plus reduction in manual effort.

ABU DHABI — May 21, 2026 — McKinsey & Company and AppliedAI announced their collaboration today to help regulated enterprises rewire mid- and back-office operations with agentic AI. The partnership combines McKinsey’s end-to-end transformation capability, including the technical depth of QuantumBlack, with Opus, AppliedAI’s Agentic Process Execution platform. The collaboration focuses on regulated industries and business process operations.

McKinsey research shows that 62 percent of organizations are experimenting with AI agents, but only 23 percent have scaled an agentic system inside their enterprise. The constraint is no longer model capability. It is execution: the ability to translate model capability into governed, auditable, production-grade workflows that hold up under regulatory scrutiny. This collaboration is built to close that gap, compressing the path from transformation strategy to operating workflow from months to weeks.

Opus enables organizations to discover, build, run, optimize, and govern agentic workflows, with a persistent enterprise memory layer that turns each deployment into compounding institutional intelligence. The platform is model-agnostic, orchestrates work across existing enterprise systems, and is designed for business stakeholders, not only technical teams, to own and evolve the workflows that run their operations, reflecting a broader shift toward putting AI capability in the hands of the people closest to the work.

The collaboration combines McKinsey’s domain and change management expertise, and QuantumBlack’s technical depth with Opus’ capabilities to help clients rapidly re-imagine and deploy agentic enterprise workflows. Under the collaboration, McKinsey leads the identification and reimagination of high-friction workflows, engaging business and technical stakeholders in new ways made possible through Opus, and embeds the governance and operating model changes required to run agentic systems at scale. AppliedAI provides the platform on which those reimagined workflows are built, deployed, and continuously improved. The combined offering is designed to accelerate time-to-value and lift the return on agentic process transformation.

“Our collaboration with AppliedAI addresses the need for an agentic solution for mid and back-office workflows. It also introduces new tools that support the enterprise AI roadmap, rapidly uncovers business requirements and re-imagines workflows that accelerates our AI efforts. This gives clients a governed, auditable path from transformation strategy to operational workflow in weeks not months,” says Ben Ellencweig, Global Lead for QuantumBlack Partnerships and Alliances, McKinsey & Company.

Demonstrated impact

In a joint deployment with a leading European chemicals manufacturer operating under stringent regulatory requirements, McKinsey and AppliedAI used Opus to transform a vendor onboarding process that had been manual, slow, and error-prone, with data fragmented across systems and progress dependent on repeated follow-ups. By automating data capture, compliance checks, and counterparty communications, the joint effort delivered:

• A 99 percent-plus reduction in manual processing effort
• Cycle time compressed from approximately two weeks to under five minutes of active processing
• Materially improved data accuracy, compliance posture, and real-time process visibility

The collaboration is designed to repeat this pattern at scale across regulated industries: identify the workflows where friction is most expensive, reimagine them with the process owners who run them, and rapidly deploy governed agentic processes into production.

• “Enterprises spend trillions globally on work that is necessary but procedural. We built Opus from first principles for the agentic enterprise, turning decades of process knowledge, trapped in documents, tribal memory, and legacy systems, into governed, production-ready workflows in minutes. Partnering with McKinsey is how we bring that reimagination to regulated industries at the scale they actually need, from financial services in New York and London to industrials in Frankfurt to sovereign-scale programmes in the Gulf.”

  — Arya Bolurfrushan, Founder and CEO, AppliedAI

• “The AI transformations are often launched with a large ambition. But ambition without execution creates frustration, not value. This collaboration delivers what our clients are asking for: a way to rewire their operations with AI that is governed, auditable, fast. It brings AI to the P&L of the organizations.”

  — Abdellah Iftahy, Senior Partner, McKinsey & Company; EEMA Business Building Practice Leader, Middle East

About AppliedAI

AppliedAI is the UAE’s AI champion and a global enterprise AI company building Opus, the Agentic Process Execution (APX) platform that lets regulated enterprises discover, build, run, and optimize governed agentic workflows. Headquartered in Abu Dhabi, AppliedAI serves clients across the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Learn more at opus.com.

About McKinsey & Company

McKinsey is a global management consulting firm committed to helping organizations accelerate sustainable and inclusive growth. We work with clients across the private, public, and social sectors to solve complex problems and create positive change for all their stakeholders. We combine bold strategies and transformative technologies to help organizations innovate more sustainably, achieve lasting gains in performance, and build workforces that will thrive for this generation and the next. Visit www.mckinsey.com for more.

McKinsey has a financial interest linked to the performance of AppliedAI. This press release is for informational purposes only and is not - and may not be relied on in any manner as - legal, tax, or investment advice or as an offer to sell or as solicitation of an offer to buy any interest in any member of the AppliedAI corporate group.