McKinsey CEO Bob Sternfels on the firm's "25 squared" restructuring: roughly 40,000 people working alongside about 25,000 AI agents, described at CES in January 2026, with every employee to be paired with an agent inside eighteen months.

Back in January, at CES in Las Vegas, McKinsey's chief executive Bob Sternfels sat for a live taping of the All-In podcast and described a firm of roughly sixty thousand workers, about forty thousand of them people and some twenty-five thousand of them AI agents. He called the plan 25 squared. Client-facing roles up about a quarter, back-office roles down about the same, with output from that shrinking side up ten percent. Inside eighteen months, he said, every employee would be paired with at least one agent.

We are seven months into that eighteen, which makes this a reasonable moment to ask what the clock has actually been measuring. This week handed me a number for it. WalkMe surveyed 3,750 people across fourteen countries and found sixty-one percent of executives say they trust AI to handle complex, business-critical decisions, against nine percent of the workers who would have to live with those decisions. Sternfels is not wrong that the agents can do a great deal of the work. What his timeline does not address is whether the consultant sitting across from the client will lean on the thing when it matters, and that kind of trust is not something a restructuring installs on schedule.

Set that beside the five pieces that went out here this week, because they kept circling the same fault line. Monday's argument was that authority stays upstairs while responsibility rolls down to people who were never handed the power to act on it. Wednesday's was that a measurement only earns its keep if the people it affects can read it and act on it. Thursday's was that a workforce prices in the real reason behind a policy inside of a week and starts answering the reason it believes. Friday's was the starkest version, a tool executives trust for their hardest calls that the people underneath them will barely touch for the same ones.

Here is where I will plant a flag. The firms that come out of this stretch ahead will not be the ones with the highest agent count. They will be the ones whose people closest to the work got a real say in where the agents were pointed. Automate from the top and you buy speed while giving up the judgment that used to tell you when speed was safe.