Is that AI agent worth it? Agentic economics and the modern operating model

By McKinsey & Company · July 22, 2026.

This McKinsey Artificial Intelligence alert email announces a new McKinsey Quarterly piece titled "Is that AI agent worth it? Agentic economics and the modern operating model." The email is signed by Dan Tinkoff and Lieven Van der Veken, global leaders of QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey.

The body of the email is short and serves as a teaser. It gives only the article's central idea, not the full argument. According to the text, as companies focus on the rising costs of AI, they must make sure they do not lose sight of "the real prize": the business value these initiatives are meant to deliver beyond keeping spending under control. The email says the article describes "6 patterns," but it does not say what they are, so they cannot be listed without making up content.

Besides the main article, the email points to two related pieces under the "Also Consider" section: "Frontiers of compute: The technologies to reduce AI inference costs" (on technologies to reduce AI inference costs) and "Cost versus value: Managing agentic AI system performance" (on managing the performance of agentic AI systems by balancing cost and value). The email does not include verifiable final URLs for any of these links because the source HTML had their addresses stripped out.

McKinsey content of this kind is usually part of the industry debate over the return on investment (ROI) of agentic AI projects in companies. This topic has come up again and again in 2025-2026, as spending on infrastructure and models rises while business results remain uneven. This is general industry context, however, and not something the email states explicitly.