Tuesday, October 27, 2026

AI is changing work. Now it has to change the organization - Alexis Krivkovich, Brooke Weddle, Holly Price, and Vik Sohoni, McKinsey

Agentic AI changes three fundamental constraints that have shaped the modern organization: human capacity, expertise, and coordination. For more than a century, the familiar building blocks of organizational design, from tasks and jobs to teams, management layers, and hierarchies, have reflected those constraints. AI doesn’t remove them entirely, but it alters them enough that leaders can ask a more consequential question: What can this company do that wasn’t possible before? Most organizations are not yet asking, let alone answering, that question. AI adoption is scaling rapidly, and individuals are already seeing meaningful productivity gains, but enterprise value has not kept pace.