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 email itself is brief and serves as a teaser: it does not include the full article, only its central idea. According to the text, as companies focus on the escalating costs of AI, they must make sure not to lose sight of "the real prize," meaning the business value these initiatives are supposed to deliver beyond cost control. The email mentions that the article describes "6 patterns," but does not say what they are, so they cannot be listed without inventing content.

In addition to 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 cut 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, as the source HTML stripped them of their addresses.

McKinsey content of this kind is generally framed within the industry debate over the return on investment (ROI) of agentic AI projects in companies, a recurring topic in 2025-2026 given rising spending on infrastructure and models against business results that remain uneven. However, this is general industry context and not something the email states explicitly.