变革推动者：智能代理时代下CEO的目标、决策与影响

QuantumBlack, AI by McKinseyThe change agent: Goals, decisions, and implicationsfor CEOs in the agentic age Companies are feeling agentic AI growing pains. Here’s what CEOs can do tomove past them and position their companies to succeed. This article is a collaborative effort by Alex Singla, Alexander Sukharevsky, Lari Hämäläinen, Oana Cheta, OlliSalo, Pallav Jain, Raghav Raghunathan, Sandra Durth, Stéphane Bout, and Vito Di Leo, representing views fromQuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey; McKinsey Technology; and McKinsey’s People & Organizational Performance andTechnology, Media & Telecommunications Practices. Executives are fond of quotinghockey great Wayne Gretzky, who is credited with saying: “Iskate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.” This is sound business advice atone level. But that puck is moving a whole lot faster than it used to as agentic AI rapidly evolves. The call to move faster may seem tone deaf as CEOs and their senior teams struggle to seebottom-line value from early gen AI investments. Developing and scaling gen AI use cases haveproven frustratingly challenging. Some executives remain unconvinced that AI agents will have asignificant impact—at least in the short term—and have stepped back from their investments.1 As CEOs navigate the uncertainty, it is worth acknowledging both the pace and potential scopeof the change that is happening.AI agents—software systems built with gen AI that have theability to plan, act, remember, and learn to achieve predefined outcomes autonomously—areevolving quickly and, as they mature, could completely change how companies are run and howtheygenerate value(see sidebar “Key trends shaping gen AI and agents”). In fact, this “troughof disillusionment” period, as John Lovelock of Gartner recently called it,2is an opportunity forexecutives to jump ahead of their competitors. How CEOs manage this changewill determine how well they can capture the benefits. AlthoughAI agents are in their infancy, earlylessons and experienceshighlight four mindsets and actionsthat can position CEOs to prosper: —Reimagine what’s possible.Much of the thinking around agentic AI today is still focused onautomating basic tasks or augmenting knowledge. The real win, however, will come frommuch bolder aspirations of rearchitected workflows and organizations built around agent-first systems. —Act with urgency and start the learning.The rapid rate of improvement of gen AIagents means that a wait-and-see approach is potentially a high-risk move (see sidebar“Breakthroughs in gen AI and agents”). Early practical learnings are invaluable in quicklybuilding a competitive advantage as the technology matures. —Tackle scale and long-term competitiveness issues now.Critical decisions aroundtechnology, trust, governance, what to buy versus what to build, capabilities, and talent areimportant to drive a wider transformation. While you experiment, start forming your strategyand developing scaling capabilities as soon as possible since execution will take longer thanexpected due to talent scarcity and organizational complexity. —Turn everyone into an agent leader.As agents and agentic systems take over more of theexecutional work, everyone in the organization will need to develop agent leadership andsupervision skills. The executive team especially needs to role model and champion learningand the evolution of their work habits. While much is still unknown, building a business for the agentic age will require afundamentalrewiringof how the business operates, innovates, and protects sources of value creation. Thisarticle, however, will focus on a few of the most important elements anenterprise CEOshouldaddress related to value, scale, and talent. We will outline what a hypothetical two-year agenticjourney might look like, what kinds of decisions CEOs should consider, and what the bigimplications could be for how companies operate. Key trends shaping gen AI and agents $36.00 in March 2023 to about $3.50in August 2024.10For some models, thecost is less than $1.00.11 AI agents are becomingmore human-like in the kinds of tasks they can do andthe way people interact with them. Thesefeatures democratize AI in a way priortechnologies haven’t and underscoreagents’ potential to affect a broad set ofactivities. The increasing possibilities ofgen AI—the foundational capability thatenables AI agents—are fueled by fourmutually reinforcing trends: system outperformed a single-agent Claude Opus 4 by more than90 percent.5 —Large growth in spend andinvestments.The compute used totrain state-of-the-art models has beengrowing roughly four to five timesper year.6The top three hyperscalerscollectively plan to invest more than$250 billion in 2025 on AI and datacenters,7and in 2023, businessesspent about $15 billion on gen AIsolutions, representing roughly2 percent of the global enterprisesoftware market.8 —Breakthroughs in model and systemcapabilities.New reasoning modelsdeploy “test time comp