工作的未来是智能体

People & Organizational Performance PracticeThe future of work is agentic The digital workforce is happening. Here’s what it maylook like when humans are working side by side with AIagents—and how to prepare now for this surprisinglynear-term eventuality. Think about yourorg chart. Now imagine it features both your current colleagues—humans, ifyou’re like most of us—and AI agents. That’s not science fiction; it’s happening—and it’shappening relatively quickly, according to McKinsey Senior Partner Jorge Amar. In this episodeofMcKinsey Talks Talent, Jorge joins McKinsey talent leaders Brooke Weddle and BryanHancock and Global Editorial Director Lucia Rahilly to talk about what these AI agents are, howthey’re being used, and how leaders can prepare now for the workforce of the not-too-distantfuture. The following transcript has been edited for clarity and length. From generative to agentic AI Lucia Rahilly:Jorge, welcome toMcKinsey Talks Talent. Jorge Amar:Thank you very much. Excited to be here. Lucia Rahilly:Jorge, there was a great little piece inTheWall Street Journalcalled “Everyone’stalking about AI agents. Barely anyone knows what they are.” What exactly do we mean whenwe talk about agentic AI? Jorge Amar:I’ll start where I think most people still are, which is generative AI. Gen AI is mostlya reactive type of AI focused on generating creative content, triggered by a prompt or aninstruction from an individual. Now if we continue the evolution of AI into agentic, we start to come to a very different reality.The first difference is we’re talking about AI that is not only generating content. It is executingon a task, on a mandate, on a particular instruction. An AI agent is perceiving reality based onits training. It then decides, applies judgment, and executes something. And that executionthen reinforces its learning. It learns if what the agent did was good or bad and then feedsthat back in. So we’re getting into the next step: AI deciding what to do on its own. We start to get into thiscomplete AI workforce. Your AI agents could now be the evolution and the creation of a digitalreplica of the entire workforce of an organization. Lucia Rahilly:OK, Jorge. You’re scaring us. Let’s talk through some use cases that might helpbring this to life a bit. What does agentic AI look like now in the wild? Jorge Amar:It’s still the Wild, Wild West out there. But I’ll try. Right now, many companies arestarting to experiment. Typically, the environments in which they are deploying agents are verydeterministic, with a clear process to follow. Think of IT help desks, or software development, orcustomer service tickets: any environment where a customer asks for something and there’s awell-defined process afterward. The agent picks it up—decides what is the right process, theright content article to be retrieved, the right information to be gathered—and then triggersan action. ‘Your AI agents could now be theevolution and the creation of a digitalreplica of the entire workforce of anorganization.’ —Jorge Amar Bryan Hancock:In HR, we’re seeing agentic AI in talent acquisition. Agents clean records. Theytry to understand, “Of the vast universe of potential candidates, how do we clean the data andunderstand who the right candidate might be?” Then a separate agent goes through and scoresthose candidates and does the ranking and the sourcing process. A separate agent reaches outto gain contact and schedule interviews. And then I’ve seen a coordinating agent that sits on top of the overall process, interactingwith those underlying agents. Have you seen that kind of coordinating agent process? Andhow do you even create an agent that coordinates across some of those discrete subprocesses? Jorge Amar:I have a client that is already doing the first screening of all candidates for the frontline entirely with agents. And I have even seen one step further: AI agents being deployed for training. Think of a call center or store environment. You generate an agentic customer, and you say,“This is a type of call. This is a type of customer. Record an interaction.” It’s not only simulating areal phone call. You’re also getting live, detailed scoring of how you, as a frontline employee, aredoing in that interaction. Are you using the right words? Have you remembered every single stepof the process? It gives you very detailed coaching instructions. Probably before, a supervisor in a call center could listen to three, five calls per agent. Now youget a summary of every single call, with a detailed breakdown of all the things this human agentis doing well and could do better. You can focus your coaching, your onboarding in a much more targeted way because you knowexactly which skills to develop, which traits to emphasize. And it’s not only recruiting andtraining; you could even do the same thing for performance management. How agentic AI is already changing work Brooke Weddle:Jorge, it sounds like you’re pointing to exampl