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, 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 the 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 detail specific figures or particular company examples within the body of the message; it merely announces the explainer video and invites subscribers to watch it, in addition to promoting the broader 'McKinsey Explainers' series for those seeking direct answers to other complex technology questions.

Overall, this kind 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 that directs the reader to the full video for the detailed analysis.