FRESH TAKES ON BIG IDEAS

I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at what makes AI effective inside organizations. What we’re seeing is that companies put most of their energy into the technology itself, but not nearly enough into the people who are expected to use AI in their day-to-day work. The big takeaway for me is simple: Even with the best systems and infrastructure in place, AI falls flat if leaders don’t deliberately manage the people side of the change. Treating employees as an afterthought gets in the way of making AI transformations work.

People aren’t robots. Work is tied to identity, pride, and purpose, and the anxiety that AI can trigger is real. If leaders ignore that emotional dimension and don’t actively bring people along, the sense of threat will only intensify. 

My team has been researching whether companies are ready for an agentic future, both at the organizational and employee levels. We find that, at the organizational level, readiness means being willing to fundamentally rewire how work gets done. To capture value from AI, companies need to redesign workflows to be AI-first, rethink roles and skills, evolve leadership capabilities, and adjust structures and governance. In many cases, HR systems need to be rebuilt to support a workforce that includes both people and AI agents. For a lot of organizations, that’s still a hard idea to fully comprehend. But the ones that do will be ahead of the curve.

At the employee level, the focus shifts to whether people have what they need to work effectively with AI. That includes access to the right tools, training, and support, as well as hands-on opportunities to experiment with AI in their daily work. It’s also about fluency—whether employees are comfortable working with AI and intend to keep using it as these tools evolve.

The signs so far indicate that people have concerns about AI at work. What’s striking is that most employees—almost two-thirds of both men and women—still aren’t being encouraged by their managers to use AI in a meaningful way. When you look closer, the gap becomes even more pronounced for women earlier in their careers, as shown by our Women in the Workplace 2025 research. Women are more concerned about how AI might affect their roles, yet they also receive less support to use these tools effectively. This matters, not only for women but for all employees, because encouragement is one of the strongest predictors of adoption.

“Even with the best systems and infrastructure in place, AI falls flat if leaders don’t deliberately manage the people side of the change.”

Organizations that scale AI successfully tend to focus on building new capabilities that create different outcomes. What we’re seeing in the data backs that up. In McKinsey’s recent research on the state of AI, innovation is the most cited benefit, followed by employee satisfaction, customer satisfaction, competitive differentiation, and cost. And when companies help employees meaningfully integrate AI into their work, they encourage people to innovate on their own. That creates stronger, more resilient workplaces.

I’m often asked why, if we know people and culture determine the success of transformations, so many organizations still struggle to get real value from AI. One reason is that AI is often framed narrowly, as a headcount-reduction or cost-cutting exercise, rather than as a way to fundamentally augment and reimagine how work gets done. Organizations that get ahead focus on how AI can expand capabilities, reshape roles, and create new sources of value, not just take cost out of the system.

Take the tech-software space. As AI use accelerates, customer expectations are rising, creating uncertainty for employees about what their roles will look like. In one company we observed, demand for certain engineering roles declined as AI capabilities matured. Instead of treating that as a workforce reduction problem, leaders focused on how to redeploy talent in a way that energized people and preserved critical institutional knowledge. This reinforced a culture that saw AI as an opportunity to grow, not a threat to be managed.

What excites me about this moment is the opportunity for AI to empower people at every level of an organization—especially on the front lines—to rethink how they deliver their work. The reality is, every employee understands their own job better than anyone else ever could. No CEO, whether they’re running a small company or a massive global organization, can know what everyone in the hierarchy does day to day. But what leaders can do is encourage people to try new ways of working. AI then becomes a catalyst for ideas and innovation that leadership alone could never design.

When people on the front lines are given the tools and time to experiment with AI, even a single idea can turn into a better product or a more efficient way of working. That mindset builds a culture of continuous improvement that elevates customer and employee experience and can even create broader societal impact. When AI stops being a technology story and starts becoming a people story—that’s where the real win is.

—Edited by Barbara Tierney, senior editor, New York

ABOUT THIS AUTHOR

Drew Goldstein is a partner in McKinsey’s Charlotte office, leading McKinsey’s culture and experience solutions group.