McKinsey: Scaling AI inference and the 5 shifts that define it

By McKinsey & Company · Wed, 14 Oct 2026.

This email, sent by Bill Wiseman and Marc de Jong, global leaders of McKinsey's Semiconductors practice, introduces a new piece titled "Scaling AI inference." The introductory text says inference is reshaping AI economics, infrastructure architectures and investment priorities across the semiconductor ecosystem.

The main article linked in the email is titled "5 shifts that define AI inference." The body of the email does not describe or list those five shifts. It gives only the headline and the introductory sentence, so they cannot be detailed here without inventing content.

In the "Also Consider" section, the email recommends two more pieces: "Frontiers of compute: The technologies to reduce AI inference costs" and "The next era of semiconductor value creation."

The email goes to subscribers of McKinsey's "Advanced Industries" alert list. It invites readers to contact the team to discuss how these ideas could affect their organization.

For industry context, inference (running already-trained models to handle requests from users and agents) has become a growing focus of cost and investment in AI infrastructure. Autonomous agents, which chain together many model calls, tend to increase that demand. The full article on McKinsey's website is needed for details on the five shifts.