External signal·MIT Technology Review·May 26, 2026·MIT Technology Review Insights·7 min read
Rethinking organizational design in the age of agentic AI
“McKinsey predicts that by 2030, three-quarters of current jobs will require redesign, upskilling, or redeployment, and organizations will need to act swiftly to amend recruitment, retention, and remuneration.”
Summary
This sponsored MIT Technology Review Insights piece (produced with agentic-AI vendor Ema) argues that agentic AI cannot be bolted onto existing operations and must be treated as a systems-level change. It cites a gap between ambition and execution: 85% of organizations want to be agentic within three years, but 76% say their operations and infrastructure can't support it. PwC UK's Prasun Shah calls the common approach 'adding sticky tapes to a breaking operating model,' while Ema CEO Surojit Chatterjee promotes a framework called 'agentic business transformation.' The article reports BCG estimates that agents could accelerate business processes 30-50% and cut low-value work time 25-40% at scale, and a McKinsey prediction that three-quarters of current jobs will require redesign, upskilling, or redeployment by 2030.
Predictions for the future of work
The article predicts that hierarchical, industrial-era workforce structures will blur as AI agents execute and coordinate tasks without managerial oversight, freeing managers from execution work but adding responsibility for trust, explainability, and psychological safety on hybrid human-AI teams. Citing McKinsey, it forecasts that by 2030 three-quarters of current jobs will require redesign, upskilling, or redeployment, forcing changes to recruitment, retention, and remuneration. It expects activity-based metrics to give way to outcome-based ones and the time to deploy new workflows to drop from months to days, affecting customer service, HR, and sales first.
Originally published by MIT Technology Review · May 26, 2026
Read the original at MIT Technology Review