McKinsey: redesigning the organization for agentic AI and global trade along geopolitical lines

By McKinsey CEO Shortlist · Fri, 16 Oct 2026 08:13:00 +0000.

This edition of The CEO Shortlist, McKinsey's biweekly newsletter featuring its best ideas for senior leaders, is curated by Alex Panas (global leader of industries) and Becca Coggins (global leader of functional practices and growth platforms). This issue looks at what AI demands of the organization and how geopolitics is redirecting trade.

Reshaping the organization for agentic AI. According to the email, most companies currently working with AI have yet to turn adoption into financial returns. In McKinsey's 2026 state of AI survey, 80% of respondents say AI has improved their individual productivity, but only 37% report a positive impact on EBIT.

A new McKinsey article outlines four shifts that can help leaders redesign their organizations' roles and workflows around agentic AI: orienting work toward outcomes, adapting the talent system, sustaining new behaviors and giving senior executives cross-functional authority.

Globalization realigns along geopolitical lines. The email notes that global goods trade grew 6.5% in 2025 despite the highest US tariffs in 80 years. It now follows two logics: geopolitics and markets. In major economies, between a quarter and a third of manufactured imports are exposed to multiple dependencies, and governments are more likely to secure supply chains for those goods while placing less weight on cost. Market logic still governs the rest, weighing cost, speed and quality. Leading companies are adapting to these new logics, guided by six emerging patterns.

The email is brief and offers only these excerpts; it does not detail the full content of the linked articles, so this summary is limited to what appears in the text itself.