McKinsey's 2025 AI@Work report reframes a debate that has been running on the wrong axis. The dominant question — will AI replace this job? — turns out to be the wrong one for most enterprise contexts. The empirically interesting question is which roles see the largest capability lift when employees are paired with AI, and whether organizations are designed to capture that.
McKinsey calls this superagency — the state where well-equipped employees, supported by AI, accomplish work that previously required entire teams. The pattern shows up most clearly in knowledge work where capacity has been the constraint: customer operations resolving more cases per hour with the same quality bar, marketing producing personalized campaigns at orders-of-magnitude greater volume, R&D running more hypotheses against the same researcher pool.
The execution gap is large. Only 39% of organizations can link any EBIT impact to AI, and for most of those the impact is below 5%. The high performers — roughly 5.5% of the sample — see >5% EBIT impact, but they look structurally different: they've redesigned workflows around AI rather than dropping AI into existing workflows. The report's call to action is workforce-shaped, not technology-shaped.
Source: McKinsey. Read the full piece at https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/tech-and-ai/our-insights/superagency-in-the-workplace-empowering-people-to-unlock-ais-full-potential-at-work.