That’s how McKinsey laid out the AI journey. They missed a step at each end.
Before: Awareness.
You cannot force AI on an organization.
Only 0.3% of the global population has a paid AI subscription. Most of them are using it as a less terrible Google, or to write longer, smarter sounding emails.
Very few understand the difference between assistive and agentic. Very few are being ambitious enough with it.
And most are quietly afraid it takes their job. That is not a technology objection. It is a challenge to identity, ego and safety.
It won’t delete the job. It will rewrite the job. The people who rewrite it first are the ones who keep it.
A leader has to lead that part. Nothing downstream works without it.
Then the middle, where McKinsey is right.
Most organizations get stuck making the current process work better, when they’d be far better served reimagining what’s possible.
The formula is straightforward:
Start with what you do today.
Ask what the most advanced with AI are doing.
Ask AI what could be better.
Rewire the workflow with the people doing the work.
That simple, and that hard. Like fitness. Like relationships. Nothing about it is intellectually difficult. It’s just hard to do well.
After: Continuous Improvement.
This is what’s really missing from the piece.
Four things are moving under every workflow you reinvent:
1. Capability: What AI couldn’t do last week, it can do now. Potential quality is changing.
2. Economics: Subscription to token usage to token efficiency. Watch how OpenAI repositioned its offerings in the last few weeks. Watch Microsoft and Google jockey over the business integration layer.
3. Skills: Prompting is a must, and prompting itself is shifting from long rigid prompts to concise, outcome based instruction. Beyond that, how we dance with AI to co-create value will demand human skills we haven’t named yet.
4. The Customer: What they want from the process is in flux too. Optimize toward an outcome they’ve moved on from and none of the above matters.
That’s a 4D matrix. Outcome, to workflow, to human/AI team.
You don’t grapple with it once. You grapple with it monthly, in all the workflows that matter.
Most organizations will do the redesign.
Few will do the rewiring of the organizational mindset to benefit again and again in the changing landscape of AI.
