OUR BEST IDEAS FOR THE C-SUITE

Welcome to the latest edition of the CEO Shortlist, a biweekly newsletter of our best ideas for the C-suite. This week, we explore how AI agents can help move the needle on gen AI investment. You can reach us with thoughts and ideas at Alex Panas and Axel Karlsson. Thank you, as ever.

—Alex and Axel

Paradoxical activity. Nearly eight in ten respondents we surveyed say their companies use gen AI—yet just as many say they’ve seen no significant bottom-line impact. AI agents—the tools we use to interact with AI—can help steer transformative function-specific use cases out of pilot mode and toward collaborations that have real impact. Our new CEO playbook on agentic AI outlines exactly how.

AI agents won’t be at the work happy hour. But your employees will likely be working with them nonetheless. “I think we are going into a world where you’ll have to think about your workforce as both agentic and human,” says McKinsey Senior Partner Jorge Amar on a recent episode of McKinsey Talks Talent. It will be essential to “create the right change story” to help employees understand the possibilities AI agents can unlock.

We hope you find these ideas inspiring and insightful. See you in a couple of weeks with more McKinsey ideas for the CEO and others in the C-suite.

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