| | | | | | |
Click to get this newsletter twice per month |
| |
|
| |
|
| | Brought to you by Alex Panas, global leader of industries, & Becca Coggins, global leader of functional practices and growth platforms
| | | | | | |
|
| | | | AI experiments are table stakes for today’s companies. But achieving real transformation requires organizations to go beyond launching a few use cases. In the second edition of Rewired: How Leading Companies Win with Technology and AI (Wiley, April 2026), McKinsey authors explore what it takes to fundamentally reshape a company to create value with AI—and why just a few are succeeding. This week, we look at core themes that separate truly rewired organizations from the rest. | | | |
| | | |
| | | Companies that are genuinely innovating with AI are using it to solve real business problems—and they’re doing so faster than their peers. Their approach is captured in an “AI transformation manifesto” by Rewired coauthors Alex Singla, Alexander Sukharevsky, Eric Lamarre, Kate Smaje, and Robert Levin, who outline 12 central themes that winning companies embrace in their AI journeys. The authors suggest that leaders embrace the following approaches, among others: | | | | | Build enduring capabilities that allow them to use any technology effectively. | | | | | | | Recognize economic leverage points where AI can deliver the biggest impact. | | | | | | | Concentrate on reinventing one to three domains with AI to generate value. | | | | | | | Strengthen the tech and AI muscles of their senior leaders. | | | | | | | Prioritize speed to innovate at scale. | | | | |
| “While there’s no question that agentic AI is pushing the boundaries of what’s possible, the themes are enduring because they focus on what it takes to harness technology to drive business goals,” the authors say. | | | | | | | | | That’s the range of improvement top-performing companies achieve in productivity, time to market, and customer experience by adopting AI in software development. In a survey of nearly 300 publicly traded companies, McKinsey’s Charlotte Relyea and Martin Harrysson also found that leading companies reported 31 to 45 percent gains in software quality by deploying AI. “Simply giving developers AI tools does not meaningfully move the needle,” they say. “The companies that unlock real value are those that rearchitect how they build software and deeply embed AI across the entire development life cycle—not just for coding.” | | |
| | | |
| | | “A house is only as strong as its foundation. That’s what companies are quickly coming to understand about agentic AI as well.” | | | | |
| | | |
| | | |
| Successful AI adoption is as much about people as it is about the tools. For companies to gain competitive advantages with AI, leaders must fundamentally reimagine workflows, processes, and business models and think deeply about how employees will need to do their jobs differently, according to Rewired coauthors Eric Lamarre, Kate Smaje, and Robert Levin. “The most important takeaway is that every AI transformation is, at its heart, a people transformation,” Smaje says in an edition of Author Talks. Lamarre notes that senior leadership must take the reins in designing how companies will leverage technology to benefit their customers and shareholders. Levin agrees—saying that the C-suite needs to drive cultural change to transform the organization. “It’s about how the top team works together, makes decisions, and prioritizes,” he says. “It’s about so much more than technology.”
| | |
| | | |
| | | |
| AI is not only helping existing companies rewire—it’s also redefining the rules of business building. Start-ups are using AI tools to run lean and are expected to grow faster than ever. “The constraints that once defined business creation—team size, capital requirements, and time to market—are being rapidly rewritten,” say McKinsey’s Chris Smith, Daniel Aminetzah, Fabian Metzeler, Jason Bello, Paul Jenkins, and their coauthors. Their analysis of hundreds of ventures founded between 2018 and 2024 indicates that those launched in the AI era (2023–24) are achieving higher output in less time, on both a per-person and per-dollar basis. The authors say three shifts are essential to build businesses faster and better in the AI age:
1. Set higher expectations for speed and productivity.
2. Build a technology foundation and allow humans and AI agents to work together from the outset.
3. Deploy small, expert teams to do what once required entire departments.
| | | Lead by rewiring to outcompete. | | | | | —Edited by Eric Quiñones, senior editor, New Jersey
| | |
|
Click to get this newsletter twice per month |
|
| | |
|
|
|
Copyright © 2026 | McKinsey & Company, 3 World Trade Center, 175 Greenwich Street, New York, NY 10007
|
|
|
|
|
|
