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Companies making the most progress in artificial intelligence (AI) are increasingly organizing teams around products, customer journeys and business processes, enabling faster decision-making and clearer accountability, according to a new McKinsey report.
The report said there is no single operating model that guarantees success. Instead, companies need to streamline workflows, reduce unnecessary handoffs and allocate resources quickly as priorities change. According to McKinseys 2026 State of AI survey, 80 per cent of respondents reported improvements in individual productivity through AI. However, only 37 per cent reported a positive impact on earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT), while just 6 per cent qualified as high performers. Only 11 per cent of organisations had reached the stage of rethinking how work is done and how value is created through AI, the report said. The report said an effective operating model should enable companies to make decisions, share information and coordinate work with fewer management layers, handoffs and manual processes. It also highlighted the growing complexity of organisations, noting that coordinator roles had grown at around 1.5 to 2 times the rate of line roles over the past five years. AI offers an opportunity to reduce this complexity rather than add to it, the report said. In a recent conversation with McKinsey, Stanford economist Erik Brynjolfsson said that focusing mainly on workforce reductions overlooks the larger opportunity to reorganise work around the capabilities enabled by AI. However, the report cautioned that excessive automation could affect employee skill development if AI takes over basic tasks through which workers traditionally gain experience. If agents take on the entry-level work through which people have historically built expertise, today's productivity gain can become tomorrow's judgment gap, the report said. A separate survey on AI readiness found a gap between employees' confidence and organisational preparedness. While 70 per cent of respondents said they were personally ready for AI, only 27 per cent of leaders said their organisations were prepared for the changes required for an agentic AI future. The report said companies need clear guidelines to govern the use of AI and define employee accountability. Citing an example, it referred to a global life sciences company whose policy states that AI should support work without replacing human creativity, expertise, autonomy or oversight. Employees remain accountable for work assisted by AI. The report concluded that companies gaining the most value from AI would not necessarily be those deploying the most AI agents or automating the most tasks. Instead, success would depend on using AI to rethink how value is created and making the necessary changes to work processes, talent management and leadership, it added. (ANI)
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