McKinsey: AI is rewriting the rules of software development

By McKinsey & Company · July 3, 2026.

For decades, the bottleneck in software development was always the same: there was never enough engineering capacity to build everything a company wanted to build. According to this McKinsey email, AI is changing that equation, and fast.

The message explains that coding assistants have given way to autonomous agents capable of specifying, writing, testing and deploying software with minimal human intervention, compressing timelines that once took weeks into days, or even hours.

The content is presented as part of the 'McKinsey Explainers' series, in explainer video format, featuring three of the firm's experts: Janaki Palaniappan, Martin Harrysson and Matt Linderman. The three discuss what is really changing on the ground, distinguishing between productivity gains that are real and those that are illusory, and what business leaders need to get right as AI takes on a growing number of software development tasks.

The email does not provide specific figures or company examples within the body of the message; it simply announces the explainer video and invites subscribers to watch it, while also promoting the broader 'McKinsey Explainers' series for those seeking straight answers to other complex questions about technology.

Broadly speaking, this type of content from consultancies such as McKinsey tends to frame the adoption of AI agents in software development within a narrative of enterprise productivity transformation, although in this particular case the email functions mainly as a promotional piece steering the reader toward the full video for the detailed analysis.