Leading Off: Charting your company’s agentic AI journey: A leader’s guide

ESSENTIALS FOR LEADERS AND THOSE THEY LEAD

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Brought to you by Alex Panas, global leader of industries, & Axel Karlsson, global leader of functional practices and growth platforms

Welcome to the latest edition of Leading Off. We hope you find our insights useful. Let us know what you think at Alex_Panas@McKinsey.com and Axel_Karlsson@McKinsey.com.

—Alex and Axel

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AI agents offer the promise of automating complex business processes and collaborating with humans to unleash new levels of productivity and efficiency. But as agentic AI continues to evolve rapidly, how exactly can organizations realize its full potential? It starts with leaders reimagining how their companies work and putting AI agents at the core, rather than simply plugging them into existing business processes. This week, we look at the key steps that CEOs can take to rewire their organizations for the agentic age.

An IDEA

An image linking to the web page “The change agent: Goals, decisions, and implications for CEOs in the agentic age” on McKinsey.com.

Chart your agentic course

How CEOs manage the process of adopting and scaling agentic AI will determine how well they capture the technology’s benefits. McKinsey Senior Partners Alex Singla, Alexander Sukharevsky, Lari Hämäläinen, Pallav Jain, Stéphane Bout, and their coauthors outline a two- to three-year road map for CEOs to visualize the journey toward becoming an agentic organization. In year one, leaders should start by building the organization’s understanding of agentic AI, creating momentum for change, and developing the foundations to enable AI agents to work at scale. “CEOs need to aspire to transformational value, which will come from rearchitecting and redesigning entire workflows with agents,” the authors say. In year two, leaders should build upon early learnings and shift their focus from specific agentic activity measures to bottom-line impact. CEOs can then begin to identify organizational and operational changes to “meaningfully reimagine the art of the possible for creating value and managing the business,” the authors say.

A BIG NUMBER

That’s the number of lessons that can help leaders generate value from agentic AI, according to Senior Partner Lareina Yee and her coauthors. After analyzing more than 50 agentic AI builds they led at McKinsey, along with dozens of others, the authors say these lessons include understanding which tasks are less suitable for AI agents, investing heavily in developing agents to prevent low-quality “AI slop” and build trust with users, and determining whether agents can be reused for different tasks.

A QUOTE

“The agentic organization paradigm will undoubtedly evolve, but today’s leaders cannot wait for perfect clarity.”

That’s McKinsey Senior Partners Alexander Sukharevsky and Alexis Krivkovich and their coauthors on why companies should act now to develop a new organizational model for the agentic AI era. They note that creating an agentic organization will require transformation across five pillars: the company’s business model; the operating model; governance; workforce, people, and culture; and technology and data. “Companies that want to secure a competitive advantage in developing an agentic organization should think boldly, move fast, and go deep,” they say.

A SPOTLIGHT INTERVIEW

An image linking to the web page “How to lead through the AI disruption” on McKinsey.com.

The rapid rise of gen AI and AI agents means organizations must move quickly to reap the business benefits. But to thrive through AI disruption, leaders can’t sacrifice strategy for speed. “While the opportunity is massive, we’ve seen a lot of lost value by starting in the wrong place,” says Ruba Borno, vice president of the Global Specialists and Partners group at Amazon Web Services. In an interview with Senior Partner Lareina Yee on McKinsey’s At the Edge podcast, Borno stresses that data, security, change management, and partnerships are all fundamental to AI transformations. She also notes that the need to work with multiple partners in developing effective business solutions represents a fundamental shift in the AI era. “When it comes to generative AI and agentic AI, no one can do it alone. It is a multiparty activity, a multiparty value proposition,” Borno says.

TRAVEL’S NEW AGENTS

An image linking to the web page “Remapping travel with agentic AI” on McKinsey.com.

Business and personal travelers alike have grown more comfortable using gen AI to research or book their trips. Now, agentic AI has the potential to bring a new level of transformation to the travel industry. Senior Partners Alex Cosmas, Jules Seeley, Kelly Ungerman, Vik Krishnan, and their coauthors note that agentic AI could help travel companies build consumer trust in AI tools. “It can detangle the more specific, thornier issues that gen AI is unable to handle. And the technology could go a step further by resolving issues on its own instead of merely suggesting solutions,” they say. Agentic AI can also automate repetitive tasks for frontline travel workers, enabling them to spend more time on customer service. In the hotel sector, agentic AI could improve efficiency in allocating guest rooms and managing maintenance and housekeeping tasks. For airlines, AI agents could create personalized bundles of services for passengers, dynamically adjust flight pricing, and fine-tune the booking process. According to the authors, “Agentic AI has enormous potential to deliver richer and more tailored experiences to consumers—not by replacing the human touch, but by enhancing it.”

Lead by seizing the agentic AI opportunity.

— Edited by Eric Quiñones, senior editor, New Jersey

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