Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping every business, including ours. But the hardest challenge is rewiring your company around it. How corporate leaders respond to that test will determine whether AI shrinks their ambition or raises it.
Throughout history, progress has come from pairing new tools with enterprising people who want to build what comes next. For companies that mistake AI’s greatest value as cutting costs, this moment will be painful. For those willing to bet on equipping good staff with extraordinary technology, this is a golden opportunity.
AI adoption and spending are soaring, but many businesses are still struggling to turn that investment into better decisions, faster execution, new capabilities and measurable returns.
To see what they’re missing, we can look at some of McKinsey’s client work. After a recent software-delivery project, a team that had needed about 10 people now operates with four, supported by AI agents that help build code, test software and do analysis.
The group’s manager validates the agents’ work and has more time to take responsibility for what’s produced. The team’s engineer spends their day building, supervising and improving the system itself.
Elsewhere, a large manufacturing client introduced an Agentic AI system that reduced human error in a production process from 5% to 0.5%.
Does this all make it inevitable that AI adopters will need fewer workers? No. When tech improves, the best people move on to the next hardest problem. That’s why we’re hiring more client-facing consultants, aiming for a 20% increase this year— most of them in entry-level positions.
Some recent studies have found that companies investing more aggressively in AI are also hiring more. This technology changes the work people do but also creates the capacity to do work that was not possible before. Our research has found that 88% of companies use AI in at least one business function, but far fewer are realizing meaningful value from it. Closing that gap is a leadership and talent problem.
The trickiest questions for companies are around how the technology will affect their operations and culture, and the risks it might entail. That feeds into the hiring and talent question too. Business leaders must decide where AI should be allowed to make decisions and where people must remain accountable.
One of the greatest difficulties for firms is how to redesign the way they work around AI, and how to try to carve out an advantage when their rivals have access to the same models. Beyond that, they need to work out how to make AI strengthen the values that define their organizations.
Given the rapid evolution of AI tools and the profound challenge of how to re-engineer entire organizations around their use, finding people who are comfortable navigating complexity is essential. Other assets coming to the fore include the ability to exercise sound judgement without as much oversight as earlier, and a gift for knowing what to trust and what matters.
Many university graduates today are AI-native and more used than previous generations to operating in a state of flux. People from non-traditional backgrounds are in demand too.
AI is, of course, changing how we work at McKinsey as well. It is taking on repeatable tasks and freeing people up for more consequential stuff.
One team cut its document review time from days to minutes; another compressed a week of analysis into half an hour. We have more than 500 consultants working in ‘agentic team rooms,’ alongside AI coding and research bots that can spin up prototypes and analytical workflows in days rather than weeks.
That raises a bigger question: If AI can do more of the work that once trained future bosses, how do we prepare the next generation to lead? For us, the answer is getting people to do work that builds their judgement. AI lets our new joiners spend less time searching for information and more time structuring problems, testing ideas and deciding what matters. Entry-level work is no longer just about analysis.
For students deciding where to invest their time, the answer is simple: Don’t gamble on today’s technology. Think about the human attributes that will become more valuable as these tools proliferate and improve. These include working well with others, a desire for constant learning and being able to apply judgement where AI is insufficient.
For CEOs, there is no playbook to copy. The challenge is reshaping organizations so AI changes the nature of how decisions are made and work gets done. Doing this at enterprise-scale will still demand human expertise and staying power. The firms that treat this moment as a headcount problem will shrink to fit it. Those that bet on talent will gladly fill that space. ©Bloomberg
The author is the global managing partner of McKinsey & Company.