McKinsey: how agentic AI can cut the 'coordination tax' in workflows

By McKinsey & Company · 2026.

This email is an alert from McKinsey's Industrials practice, signed by Dorothee Herring and Steffen Fuchs, the practice's global leaders. It announces a new article titled 'Cutting the "coordination tax": How agentic AI can reshape workflows'.

According to the short preview in the email, organizations must redesign their workflows to capture real value from AI, and the main challenge is deciding where to start. The text suggests that the biggest opportunity lies between the steps of a workflow, at the points where work passes from one team to another or from one system to another. This is what the headline calls the 'coordination tax' that agentic AI could help reduce.

The body of the email does not develop the argument further. It is a teaser linking to the full article ('Reimagine workflows with AI') on McKinsey's website. It also includes an 'Also Consider' section with links to two other related pieces, 'The decision dividend: How AI creates economic value' and 'Building the foundations for agentic AI at scale', with no further detail on their content.

In pieces like this, McKinsey generally looks at how agentic AI (systems that can carry out tasks more autonomously across different steps of a process) can reduce organizational friction and coordination costs between teams and systems. This particular email, however, provides no figures, examples or case studies: it simply presents the headline and invites readers to read the full article.