Trend Shift 2: work is redesigned around human-agent collaboration rather than agent insertion

Summary

McKinsey's second organizational shift concerns how work is designed once AI agents arrive. Agentic AI refers to systems that can plan and pursue multistep goals with limited human oversight. The report argues that dropping agents into existing workflows captures only a fraction of their value, and that workflows should be rebuilt from the ground up around cooperation between people and agents. Agents should not sit at the center of everything, because they still lack many human capabilities and need supervision. The task is to break processes into discrete activities and decide, based on economics, ethics, and technology maturity, which ones humans do, which agents do, and how the two combine.