328. Driving agentic transformation: How AI is rewriting the playbook on large-scale change

0:00Tomer Slaney: We observe all these jobs change, but they change in ways that are cool. You spend less time making a PowerPoint deck and crunching, you know, figuring out some data irregularity and spend more time coaching that initiative owner on how to make the procurement initiative more impactful. That's cool. And so I think what we found at all levels of our transformation office, from the most junior person all the way to the chief transformation officer, him or herself, the role is different. The tools are different. The underlying core job of changing humans is not different, but you go about it in a different way.

0:33Tomer Slaney: And that way is generally more fun and exciting and allows people of all tenures to have more impact. For McKinsey and Company, I'm Sean Brown, and welcome to Inside the Strategy Room. That was Chase Covington, co-author of our recent article, The Agentic Transformation Office, Redefining the Economics of Change. And in today's episode, we discuss how transformation workflows are ripe for agentification and how deploying agents allows a transformation office team to focus more on the human side of change. coaching, generating ideas, pushing for value, and the change management itself, the kind of work that makes for an even more successful transformation.

1:15Tomer Slaney: Chase is a partner based in our New York office and a leader in our transformation practice, as well as our strategy and corporate finance practice. Chase, welcome. John, appreciate the introduction. And Tomer Slaney is a partner in our New York office and an expert in change management and long-term change success. Tomer, it's great to have you here. Thanks, Sean. Good to be here. So in your new article, you note that the transformation office, the very function charged with driving massive change across organizations, is also proving to be one of the slowest to adopt AI technology. So, Chase, why is there this somewhat ironic lag?

1:53Tomer Slaney: Yeah, that's kind of the dirty secret, right? I think what we observed is a lot of transformation offices or PMOs or integration offices, whatever variant you want to name you want to put on that, were relatively slow to identify, despite often pushing agentic solutions onto an organization or at least espousing to do so. And I think that, you know, to some degree, the core reason for that is they're just busy, really, really busy with the day to day. There's always a ton of work in a PMO or transformation office or a growth office, whatever it might be. And so the insight for us was how do we get those group of clients, take a step back and really think through how those workflows can be different.

2:40Tomer Slaney: And when we did that, what we typically found is a lot of the grunt work in a transformation office can be agentified in a way that enables the people in that office to operate at a higher level. So you're not producing a report, you're producing a change outcome in the enterprise. And that's really the key to the whole, to the article we wrote, what is powerful about agentifying a transformation office. thanks jason tomur could you talk a little bit about where ai fits into the broader context of transformations and where you see it creating the most value yeah absolutely so when we talk about

3:16Chase Covington: ai and transformation really think of it as an entire range of how do you identify the functions in the transformation office how do you elevate the work that's being done and the level which is operating there's also the entire notion of how do you identify the transformation how do you make things available to your participants, if that is co-pilots, writing business cases, plugging to ERP systems to populate financials and impacts, tying it to board documents, and all the way into transformations really being the, or AI being the catalyst for transformation. So the reason for change for many of the organizations is preparing themselves and rethinking how they remain competitive in an agendified or in an AI forward environment going forward.

4:00Tomer Slaney: And maybe, Sean, I add one thing here, just as we think about what is an agentic transformation. A year ago, two years ago, I think we were getting lots of inbounds from clients and maybe I want to do an old school transformation or I want to do an agentic transformation. Those are somehow separate things or separate asks, maybe even separate approaches from our side. But I think what we've seen over the course of the last 24 months, that coming together. The analogy I give you is if you were to tell somebody you're listening to digital music versus just on Spotify. Of course you're listening to music.

4:34Tomer Slaney: Or the vinyl. And so the concept of an agentic transformation is just all transformations need to be using agentic levers because that's just one of the most defining technologies of our time. It would be like saying, hey, I'm using the Internet for my transformation in 2005. Of course, right? So I think we will reflect that language throughout here. I don't think there's in our minds as much a distinction between an old school transformation and a Gentic one, because a Gentic is just a really powerful lever to execute change at scale in the business that we're working into all the efforts that we're doing.

5:06Tomer Slaney: Thanks. And just to dig into that a little bit more deeply, Chase, does the concept of Gentifying the transformation office make it more accessible to more companies or does it make it more straightforward, for example? It makes it more accessible to more companies because the human resource load required to stand up an effective transformation office is lower. It doesn't mean it's any more difficult in terms of executing change, but just the standing up the basics. We find the barriers to entry there a little lower. I think what's more interesting, though, is less, hey, more companies can do this now because you don't need as many people in the TO.

5:43Tomer Slaney: That's less interesting. What I think is more interesting is in any company that's using a TO, your TO can reach more employees. And if you can reach more employees, you can embed change more granularly into the organization, which our research shows dramatically increases the odds of success. That, I think, is actually the more interesting conversation, right? Got it. So, Tomer, how is the identification of the transformation office changing what the TO actually does? Is there a market difference in the typical activities? that those in the TO are spending their time on? And what does a typical transformation office week look like?

6:20Chase Covington: Yeah, so if we think about sort of what that catalyst for change was and why to agentify, we went and looked at some teams and we have the research here. One example team that we looked at, four-person team, how are they spending their time? And 80 % of that time is spent on reporting, creating materials, preparing for meetings, doing the follow-ups. A lot of the stuff that is both very time-consuming also very condensed into a certain time of the week, but also very repeatable, very predictable, very manual, as Chase said. That's the grunt work of the transformation, but it's stuff that you need to do.

6:55Chase Covington: It's stuff that you need to do and need to do correctly and you need to do well, because a lot of the change management occurs when there is trust in the system and the transformation. This is the kind of stuff that you need to do to maintain that trust. The materials that are produced are correct. The stuff's on time. The decks are ready. And through both the amount of other tasks that these teams were doing, the people staffed on these TOs, the people running these TOs, just getting more exposure to AI tools, whether it's Cursor or Take Your Pick, and looking at other initiatives in the transformation saying, hey, these are the things that are being identified in the company, starts in taking all of that initiative saying, hey, we can make our own lives easier.

7:36Chase Covington: There's also a bit of the tension where longer running transformations towards the back end of the horizon, the expectation is that these transformation offices get smaller and they get more efficient. But in fact, what we actually see is they actually start getting access to more and more data sources as these transformations progress. right we create the more capabilities we feed in more data which is actually increasing the the time required to do reporting which squeezes out more of the elevated discussion that chase was talking about like creating the insights driving the change creating the narrative so expected to be doing more with less and getting more of the grunt work to boot

8:18Tomer Slaney: so does this help the transformation office move more quickly or just focus on as chase alluded to more of the change management, which in turn then helps the organization move more quickly?

8:31Chase Covington: Within a given week, you are going to move more quickly from when data is available until materials are ready, until insights are starting to be published, until we start looking for the answers to the questions raised by the data. The transformation will still move at the cadence that we expect it to move at, right? Transformations tend to be regimented, moving at a weekly cadence between the meetings in preparation for executive committees, board meetings, those sorts. What we are allowing these teams to do, what these teams are actually allowing themselves to do with these tools is front run a lot of the grunt work early when data is available, spend more time on the insights, on the coaching, on the actual human side of the change management in preparations for these meetings or these big events where decisions can be made, where things can be rolled out.

9:22Right.

9:22Tomer Slaney: And so as you see more of this agentification of the transformation office in your work, what are some of the early hiccups you've experienced? I'll give you one. It's kind of a funny example, but it's emblematic. I think the technical term is cognitive surrender, which is a really scary way of saying you just let the AI chatbot do your job. And we actually saw some of this really with more junior colleagues, colleagues of ours or even clients where it's, hey, this chatbot can create something that looks at first blush pretty good. It's formatted really well. It's got color scheme and it's kind of structured and that's neat.

10:03Tomer Slaney: But then when you review it, it actually turns out to be slot. And so the pitfall is how do you create the right moments for human in the loop to ensure that the output is high quality? How do you treat the agents you're creating as almost like junior colleagues, but still keep the reviews as the information moves up the chain, so to speak. So that by the time it's going in front of the CEO, you're not embarrassed by, you know, some AI, AI slot. Thanks. And Tomer, what kinds of challenges have you seen as teams have moved to agentify their processes?

10:36Chase Covington: Yeah, I know. Like speaking of in front of the CEO, similar to that sort of the cognitive surrender, there's also the attention surrender. If you know that something else is paying attention, you can multitask. And we actually saw one of these teams develop a good way to turn meeting transcripts into lists of actions. So at the end of many of these meetings, we will make sure that we know who's doing what is next steps. And one of these chatbots, which was looking at the list of actions, picked on a little bit of sarcasm in the meeting, where the chief transformation officer asked a participant, do you just want the CEO to call every single employee and tell them to do their job?

11:10Chase Covington: and the chatbot picked up an action CEO to call every employee in the company to tell them to do their job, which, you know, luckily, you know, it was still very much a human in the loop, but that would have very much unattended, been sent to the CEO and tell him to go call everybody in the company and make sure they do their job.

11:27Tomer Slaney: Yes, that's a great example and not one that I think the CEO would have appreciated. But I think the lesson is to pay attention as technology actually accelerates the transformation. So, Tomer, on that point, can you talk a little bit about the cadence, the pace of the transformation office as it agentifies and how agentic impacts the pacing, because every week there's a lot of information that's gathered, synthesized, and then reported on. How does that really increase the metabolic rate of a typical transformation? Yeah.

12:00Chase Covington: Happy to talk about what we think about as a typical transformation. Every one's going to be slightly different, different dates, different periods. But generally speaking, we are going to be working in a cadence where there's the ability to elevate discussions and decisions to an executive committee every week. That's sort of some of the magic of the transformation of driving the rigor and the decision-making and the cadence, which allows us to drive change of pace. And to do that, we have to prepare for this meeting every week. And there's a whole cascade of meetings and new data pool. So data is pulled every week.

12:34Chase Covington: We then look at the famous week over week change. The nature of this means that from the minute the data is pulled until the key meetings happen, it's when we tend to crunch all that, what we call the grunt work, the repeatable, predictable, manual work that needs to happen, tends to happen between that data pool and the executive meeting. And you can move the data pool around the week. It won't materially change the way that that crunch happens. But unfortunately, from when that data pool happens until the executive meeting is when you actually want the best time to spend time with the data for the insights, for the actual decisions that you need to drive from that week.

13:14Chase Covington: When you do that with last week's data, you always get the questions like, is this data changed? And that's used very often used as a way to not make decisions and not drive change. So we've created this structural limitation or structural ceiling, as we've called it, that we compress all of the TO team's time between when we're doing the data pull and when we're having the meetings where we need to be using that data and not leaving time for, as Chase mentioned, that elevated thinking and discussion and coaching and teeing up the decision and the strategic so what's or the big insights from that same data pull, which is unfortunate because come Friday and Monday, when the teams continue doing some processing, they come up with all these insights and those might be either stale or the data might have changed by the following tuesday or whenever you pull the data which which case they spend a lot of time just bridging back to last week's data and saying is that still valid by that time they're crunched again with the data meeting happens and there's also the you know just that sense of like we know that we need to have that discussion but just the data wasn't ready because we were so busy updating things.

14:19Tomer Slaney: Thanks, Tomer. And Chase, earlier you alluded to this idea that agentification could also be applied in a project management office, for example. So in your client work, are you seeing this agentic approach being deployed across other major change programs? All of it, all of it, whether it's a transformation, whether it's a turnaround, whether it's a merger integration, whether it's a dimestiture and carve out, whether any sort of change program broadly defined, I think this is super relevant for. Now, the exact tools and how you think about what the objective of the PMO or the transformation office or the strategy, whatever, that changes, I think, for sure, how you configure the setup of the office and the tools that you're deploying.

15:03Tomer Slaney: But the concept of using these tools to take the people in that office and make them more effective, that's pretty universal. So I'm curious to touch on what the experience is for the people in the organization who are then driving the change what is their interaction like with this agentified transformation office and where does the human in the loop remain critical there yeah so first of

15:29Chase Covington: all there's the folks inside the to and think the change management management there is also very important if you are an individual leading or setting up a to realizing some of the design choices you'll be making and deploying these tools of the change man that you'll need from the from transformation office team right the transformation office team is also a group of individual who individuals who will have to adopt some change there's a big risk of you know call it false positives or just the fact that the tools can create so much more data and that will that will actually do the inverse of what you're looking for that can actually go and create a lot more work for the to team if you if you sort of don't set thresholds or guardrails of like i want to know about every change from last week and i want a little speaker note next to every little thing the change or any time that somebody's updated a forecast and not updated the KPIs, I want to know if that's an error or if there was an error before that they're fixing or if that was intentional.

16:24Chase Covington: The fact that you can now go and look at thousands of initiatives and tend to thousands of KPIs and impacts can actually drive a lot more work for your TO team. So there's also the change management element in there. Many of us have probably received, even if they are well put together, AI-generated content from our teams, clients, assistants, you know how to spot them, you know what those little icons next to all the bullets look like. There is some hesitation. The bar for this being useful is higher. Just generating more and generating more often to more people is rarely the solution. Actually, and a lot of the things we'll be talking about in the human and the loop, most of what we're seeing from best practice is these tools generating content and insight for the TO team and the human and the loop is still not just doing quality fact context checking.

17:18They're also applying some common sense of,

17:22Chase Covington: does everything need to be sent out? Does this need to be personalized, especially when it comes to executives? And while setting up an entire different structure to run transformations in every function, I think will backfire. You are, as we said, crunched. The same executives coming to the meetings from the BUs, if they are not getting what they need from answers, insight from the TO, will likely at some point, once they get hammered a couple of times, stand up their own functional capacity within their teams to generate that. Those individuals are prime candidates for getting some of this automated stuff.

17:56Chase Covington: They're very much an extension of the transformation office. So if you've already got those, as far as change agents in your organizations, Those folks would be sort of the prime candidates where we do see the benefit of sending more and automated communications. Can I just put a super fine point on this?

18:12Tomer Slaney: Don't use your AI bots to talk to the business. That sucks. The purpose of a transformation office is to drive change. That's human to human. Because when your TO is interacting with the quote unquote business, they're pushing for value, they're counseling, providing feedback. No agent's going to do that. So use your agents to make your TO people better, not create more work for folks. Got it. Thank you. And Tomer, can you talk through the areas of work where you would say agentification really has the most impact?

18:47Chase Covington: Yeah. So we started talking about sort of those data, the data pools, the creating, creating the materials, creating the slides, creating the, you know, the first pass of things. I think we've, we've discussed that quite a bit. There is the offloading of the weekly task. I go check this, go update that, go send this into that depository, do the data cut. One thing that we've actually seen teams push on and create a lot of value out of is once these materials have been created, the emails have been sent, et cetera, uploading everything and letting your agents, creating agents that will go and check this week's materials, this week's uploads, this week's downloads, versus other things.

19:31Chase Covington: And they tend to catch and they are able to go through just so much more than your team can. They can go through every last slide on every last appendix and identify, hey, is there a place where this week's insights contradict last week's insights? Is there a place where the data that we're showing in the transformation is contradicting the data we showed in the NBR last week? Is there a place where we saw a change in initiative that we expected to see a change in the dependent initiative and we didn't see happen? So as these agents get trained better in a single transformation context, this is the kind of work that makes this team do better, not just do more and do faster.

20:11Chase Covington: So we're seeing the whole spectrum of that work being agentified from pulling the data, doing the admin work. We're seeing agents being trained right now on meeting attendance and agendas. So if last week we agreed that this is the action, this person needs to come speak to that, has that person been invited to the meeting? We have somebody sharing their change story, somebody being recognized if there's an expectation there in the meeting. But it was usually a TO's team to go and make sure that we have the right agenda and we have the right people and these people have been invited, et cetera, et cetera.

20:43Chase Covington: Now, Outlook MCPs allow folks to even go and say, hey, have the invites actually been extended to the right people for the right meeting? Or have we sort of missed that? We put them on the agenda, but not the invite and show up at the meeting. Like, where's Jenny? I was like, oh, oops. Maybe a jumping tomer. Yeah.

20:57Tomer Slaney: I think the risk here is if you're new to this, you're going to have your TO teams create a whole lot more stuff. The decks will be three times as long, all that. That's not that helpful. When I counsel clients on it, I use it. Same length deck, sharper insight. So use the tool to get to that. It's easy to create a lot of slop, but that's generally unhelpful. So keep that in mind when you think about what work, you know, moves to agent versus stays with human. And so Chase, what are some of the ways that you help make sure that that happens in your teams? Honestly, the simplest way to do it is have someone pitch to you the material they've created.

21:37Tomer Slaney: Because it will quickly sort out what's like, hey, I've actually thought about this, or I just type something in and hit enter twice and, you know, email. So have it almost Shark Tank style pitch and ask a little bit of kind of probing questions. Do you actually understand where that data point comes from? Or am I going to use this in counseling someone from the business? Those questions typically pretty sharply get to the meat of what you're trying to communicate, not the kind of fluff that goes around it.

22:06Chase Covington: I've got one rule on my team. You can use any tools you would like, as long as they're sort of approved to use by our risk, the client's risk. But if you put something on a page, it's yours. The same way you would never respond to, where do you get that information that I have? Google, right? It is an unacceptable answer for somebody to say, who wrote that? And they say, cursor. That sort of is a, use anything you want, but if it's on a slide, it's your materials. And that is the rule for every single person on any one of our teams.

22:36Tomer Slaney: Makes a lot of sense. And Tomer, you just mentioned the word risk. So there's the risk of accepting what you get from an agent without questioning it. There's also the risk that that information within the TO might leak outside of the organization or even within the organization. So the TO by its nature is privy to very sensitive information. And I wonder how you help keep tabs on that from an agentification perspective. And how does using centralized tracking software, including our wave transformation platform, help to mitigate this risk? so earlier days of of all this identification many material creations updates were driven by

23:19Chase Covington: extracts a team would extract data the same way they would for everything else and feed it it in pre-identification there was the common sense of saying hey this is actually has the word confidential in the title you know this kind of sense of information that we would not like to share and that didn't make it into the materials that control is not necessarily built into any vibe coded agent that somebody's come up with or a automated update so first we've started off we start by putting putting rules in place as you're downloading extracting information there's a certain way to do it but more more recently you know especially for the transformations using wave the wave ai team is built to start building something called wave apps which allows allow this It's actually designed for this.

24:03Chase Covington: It allows you to work with data in Wave. A, you don't keep extracting data, right? Even extracting that data onto share drives, as you said, there's a potential there's quite a bit of sensitive data in these transformations, right? So we have eliminated that need to go and just make weekly huge data extracts, which has everything and all of it in it in one place and plug straight into your performance infrastructure. But also those Wave apps have the ability to set your visibility, to mash an audience that you're preparing something for. So that you've built in the guardrails that you're not doing that.

24:35Chase Covington: And we are, generally speaking, seeing that if in the past tech teams were building applications of building software, those tech teams have been trained on guardrails, risk control. As this is being more democratized and we're seeing everybody vibe code from every function, the guardrails, the sort of the mindset of the risk has not caught up. All right.

25:00Tomer Slaney: So we talked earlier about how agentifying the transformation office frees it up to focus more on the human to human or change management aspects of the transformation. But why use agents to achieve that? Couldn't you just add more human capacity in the first place? Or is there really an ideal size for a transformation office and you can't make it much bigger than that?

25:23Chase Covington: Can a TO be too big is maybe a good, provocative question. I think the way I know, the way the way I approach that is saying that the size of the TO should be driven by the number of work streams, stakeholders and interactions that TO has. And it's very much sort of the coaching. And that is the big driver of more work. Right. Making a bigger team to make more slides. But you're going to fall into the trap that you need people to read more slides. You'll have a team that you'll have to then grow a team to read the slides. So very much on, if you think about the core function of the TO, before you start expanding it, and whether that is distributed at the work streams or the BUs, or whether there is in the TO with coverage to those work streams from coaching, that is very much the value-added work.

26:07Chase Covington: That is the work of talking through the valuation, problem-solving how to move initiatives forward, unblocking problems in the delivery. If you're just putting in more people to look at more data sources, to generate more data, you know, fast forward, you're going to need even more people in the future because the data and the transformation only goes one way. There's always more of it. So as we looked at the identification and we're back to that same sort of four-person team that we looked at earlier in implementation, that team developed four main agents that they were using from materials creation, the admin, the checks.

26:43Chase Covington: and by doing that over a period of time, actually in a period of time where the team was expected to get smaller, what we were able to do is one, cut down the team without traditionally, historically, they would probably just offload that work into more work for fewer people. They were able to offload a lot of that work into the agents and they were able to free up an entire individual's worth of time. And at the same time, they reduced more than that amount of capacity and all of the functions which we consider the value-adding functions, whether that is refilling the pipeline or thinking through the niche and cases of valuation and what can be done about these and how do you actually make these progress and how do you make these work and how do you refine business cases, they were able to do more of that and do more on the inside creation at the same time.

27:33Chase Covington: So do more of the valuable stuff, do less of the less valuable stuff and shrink the team at the same time.

27:39Tomer Slaney: So Chase, anything you'd add here? Yeah, my take on this is TOs, PMOs, IOs, and IMO are generally pretty small and should be. They shouldn't be cottage industries. I think most folks intuitively understand that. Taking a small group and making it a little bit smaller doesn't really make a lot of money for your enterprise. That's not really where the value comes from. where the value comes from is having that small group of people spend time on what matters, which is coaching, providing feedback, pushing for more value, doing interesting analysis. That's the beauty here. One takeaway from this conversation could be, hey, you could do your TO stuff with a smaller team.

28:26Tomer Slaney: Yeah, sure. Although I think that's honestly pretty limited in terms of value creation. The value creation here is at being a better TO. Indeed. And it gives those executives in the TO a much better handle on how things are going and a much better ability to connect with the individuals who are actually going to be driving the change, right?

28:46Chase Covington: And get you happier TO members, right? Like, let's be real. Folks join the TO to drive change, not to make reports. They'd rather be doing that.

28:55Tomer Slaney: Absolutely. And so, Tomer, can you perhaps take us through a deep dive into some specific examples of how agents are being used in the TO right now? What

29:05Chase Covington: does it look like in action one is the i talked about the daily control control quality control right every night and this has been trained so refined every night we have an agent that runs on a transformation that transformation plugs into your performance infrastructure or you can give it a download this was built originally we just wave download or with just data downloads and it goes through all of the plans in in your transformation and says hey what changed yesterday and if this changed am i expecting other changes and there's there are changes that we always know or interlinked? Is there a case where an element has changed and the domino effect of follow-up changes did not happen?

29:40Chase Covington: And can we actually catch that now when somebody is still sort of in the mindset of, oh, I'm updating this now. I know what this is about. The same person is still on that task at the moment and catching those early. So it then went through prioritized lists on magnitude of changes. What is the number of follow-up effects we wanted, right? So especially if you have dependent initiatives, you can tell your transformation infrastructure will know. If initiative one moves, two, three, and four are dependent cannot start before one finishes. It will check all of those and really tee up the transformation office to be able to reach out to the individuals.

30:18Chase Covington: And it does a couple of things from also a change perspective. One, it tells people that the transformation office is actually on top of it, that they care. It allows the transformation office to reach out to folks when they see a change before they have to explain a variance. So I'm going to put myself in your corner, right? I will help you make that change before it makes it into the executive materials. Let me help you out here. It creates a lot of goodwill between the transformation office and the participants. And this is the one where I'd caution that you can actually create a lot of too much information for the office.

30:53Chase Covington: So very much one where you want to control the filters and the sensitivity and the prioritization because you don't want to pick up every two cents of change and say, go explain that. So that's one sort of good example where I think has been probably the most well received. It was the one that created the most additional work up front for the team, one where they had to train it quite a bit to get good. But when they started seeing that secondary benefit of the kind of relationship that allowed them to create with the work streams, with the folks and with the participants, actually create a lot of excitement within both the transformation office and the work streams that this is going on and this is happening.

31:32Tomer Slaney: And Tomer, do you create that sort of filtering, if you will, up front as you're agentifying the TO? Or do you sort of see the results come in and say, OK, we've got to dial this back because we're getting too much detail here. It's not helpful.

31:46Chase Covington: Well, in this instance, it was very much dial it back. And in most instances we've seen, it's been the dial it back. And transformations are, each one's of a different size and different magnitude. One thing that we built in very early was prioritization. So even if you have a list which is too long, you start going from the top. At some point, you get into stuff which is meaningless and you stop. So even if the data exists and you know and the expectation is not that you check everything off the list every day, that can work. You don't have to spend all your effort playing around filters.

32:16Tomer Slaney: And so can we talk now a little bit about creating all these PowerPoint decks? I think everybody would love to hear how agents are helping with that aspect of the work.

32:26Chase Covington: So deck drafting is the first place that most teams go to. It's the biggest time constraint on a team. It's the one thing that when you get wrong, you get wrong. It's, if you look at the weekly work plan of every transformation office, this tends to be, it's the data pool analysis, draft the deck that goes into it. It is the most repeatable, predictable, grunt worky work that a transformation office does. Go and take this data, put it in these materials, update the comments. And I'm very purposely calling it deck drafting and not deck making. the first part before you actually start bringing the insight and the context and the analysis into the decks is where these agents have been doing very well especially when you're in the back end of the transformation you've got 50 weeks of decks to look at you have a lot of data to look at you can actually train an agent to do a pretty good job of doing most of the work up front it does still require you to go through every single page and every single insight you will also like the teams get to know week over week where the agent does a very better job than not where there are still holes in the in the insight what it does very well though the teams have never done as well is it will also go through and read with a fine coat fine tooth comb last week's deck and the week before and the finance reports and your revenue revenue reports and it will flag not necessarily change it will flag with their inconsistencies and then as you start thinking about drafting the the prep notes for your chief transformation officer or for your executive members, participants in the meetings, you can actually start preempting saying, hey, by the way, and this differs to that, either we know why and you shouldn't hear the talking points, or this may come up in the meeting, you should probably be able to talk that and explain it.

34:18Chase Covington: So not only does it draft it a bit faster and takes off a meaningful amount of the grunt work and the time, the work the team doesn't love doing, it actually does also that back to the change manager, create a lot of goodwill with executive participants, specifically by pointing out to them where there might be quite a need to do some explaining.

34:37Tomer Slaney: And Chase, if we call out this importance of keeping the transformation human, how do you ensure this automated drafting of the key outputs doesn't impact on that in terms of TO members being really sure of their content and truly owning it? Most of these agents we're going to talk about are pretty obvious. Like it's obvious, hey, we should use AI to like make some of these decks we present. Like, yeah, of course. You don't need McKinsey to tell you that. You probably are already doing it. But what I suspect you're going to encounter is your team members won't really know what they're saying. They'll be that cognitive surrender because, ah, someone else wrote that.

35:14Tomer Slaney: And so I think like many of these agents in the TO, it's obvious you should use them. It's not hard to configure them, but to make sure they actually create the value that we're talking about is relatively difficult. So, you know, how do we go about that? It's all about being thoughtful about creating human in the loop moments, right? When do we have a review? Who does the review? How does that review cascade through the members of the transformation office team? I think that's really critical to be thoughtful. It's different in every context. I don't do not there's not a five point framework for it.

35:50Tomer Slaney: We can give you principles, but it is different in every context, but it requires real active thought. It's not it's not the afterthought. Super. And Tomer, you mentioned earlier this idea of using agents to conduct consistency audits. Can you dive into that a little bit for our listeners and what it actually looks like?

36:08Chase Covington: Yeah, I think we spoke about this one quite a bit. Agents that are able to make sure that week over week things are not dropped and we're consistent week over week, that if we add a action to follow up on something from three weeks ago, it actually shows up on the agenda. If there's somebody invited to the meeting, they're actually showing up there. Inconsistencies with MBR decks. It does require you to feed in quite all of this information. Depending on, like Chase said, sort of politics in the organization, does the TO actually have access to all of these different decks and functions? But when the teams do, there's a real unlock here that just prevents the derailing of conversations of, oh, you're saying this, but my chief revenue officer said something very different than yesterday's revenue review, or the CFO showed me a different number for this last week in the NBR.

36:58Chase Covington: And you start having discussions about bridging information rather than about doing something about gaps and misses. And there's a real benefit to that here. I think we've already spoken quite a bit about how that comes to happen, but effectively just, if you have the more information to feed it, feed it the information and don't automate the emails.

37:15Tomer Slaney: The consistency audit's a big one. This is where the most junior people on the TO spend the most of their time. And it's kind of this detective effort. The degree to which we can provide tools to make this not faster because that actually is to make this more insightful and accurate. That's really powerful. So before we wind up our episode, let's talk a little bit more about some of the key takeaways. Tomer, what would you want to call out for our listeners as they think about agentification in their transformation office?

37:47Chase Covington: So as you think about what you want to identify, we've just had some examples. This is going to be true for everything, not just a transformation office, is understand what you're doing and how it fits in before you start doing anything. Don't automate for the sake of automation. So get to grips with what are the actual workflows? What is the team actually doing? What is the flow? We had a chart up there saying, here is when you pull the data, here is this meeting that turns into that meeting. actually have a good understanding of what that looks like. Set up the rules of what the agents can do in condo so that governance, right, before you start building the actual agents.

38:28Chase Covington: Secondly, as you think about roles, responsibilities, capabilities, orchestrators, we used to say that you want, you know, good project owners in the transformation office, analytical capabilities. So start rethinking that, right? So if you would like these folks to not just run, but also innovate and build as you're staffing your TO team even from the front. It's hard to come and staff data scientists to come and do the work and do it to the TO, right? All the success that we have seen has been organic, but it's honestly been fortunate that we've just had the right profiles in the right TOs and they got to feel the pain.

39:06Chase Covington: They got to see sort of what is their grunt work? What does it take? And then sat down and could actually reimagine what it would look like if they could automate, quote unquote, for their own benefit. right invest in the change management both within the to right like i said you can actually create quite a lot of work and resistance in the to and be up front about it say that you know we're going to do something and it's going to be bumpy or there's somebody on the tier wants to do something there's two or three other folks who are going to live with the consequences and be up front and saying you know this is going to be a learning process and we're going to have to iterate and we're going to have to see what we get and the first one's going to be clunky and we'll improve

39:46Chase Covington: and lastly when it comes to the automated emails when it comes to as chase said if it's on the page you made it it's very much make sure that you build that trust in the system make sure that everything that comes out of out of your to is of the same standard that you have been used to don't put slop out there because if you start eroding the trust in the to you start eroding to the trust in the transformation programs. And that domino effect is very unhealthy.

40:13Tomer Slaney: Thanks, Tomer. Chase, are there any particular AI platforms that are really well-suited to agentifying the transformation office? The vast majority of the stuff we observe in a transformation office can be done by open source models. And open source models are getting quite good. For me, it's less of like, hey, go use this model. That's actually not it. I think it's less, to be totally honest, what is the platform to use because they're all pretty reasonably good and more about how you customize the workflow to work in your context. That's where I see failure modes. I don't see failure mode on, oh, we picked the wrong model.

40:52Chase Covington: The other thing maybe just to point out there is consistently using the same models. So things that were built for one solution and trained on one set of decks do well. You keep the same LLM running behind them. Actually, when teams have gotten, well, we now have access to a newer, fancier LLM. have actually seen a regression in what they get. Because a lot of this is knowing what to expect, right? You have planned your workflow around, I'm going to do this, the model's going to do that, I'm going to get X. If X changes materially because you've changed your model, you might actually go backwards in the time required it takes from you.

41:27So as Chase said, the open source models

41:30Chase Covington: tend to do exactly what you need here, but also don't keep upgrading because you're going to keep changing what you're getting as an output, maybe not what you expect to get.

41:38Tomer Slaney: So before we end, can you share a story of the most inspiring outcome or impact that came out of your work with teams that agentified the TO of a client that you worked with? Maybe Tomer, we can start with you. Yeah.

41:52Chase Covington: For me, it was actually very much around the experience of the folks on the team. Right? For me, it was a team on year two of a transformation of the implementation and having a sit down over lunch with the team. And they're saying, actually, we're a lot more excited about the work that we're doing. We feel like we are doing better work because we are able to engage in stuff that, you know, this is why we joined the team. this is what we were hoping for. And realizing that a lot of that is possible because they are not spending 45 minutes of every hour copy pasting materials from data dumps into presentations.

42:34Tomer Slaney: There you go. Thank you, Tomer. And Chase, you get the last word. You know, my thought on agentifying a TO is similar to my thoughts broadly on agentification. You know, there is, when we first started doing this, I thought, oh man, does this mean we no longer need all these junior people. We get rid of all these. Nope. That's not the case. That's not what we observed. We observe all these jobs change, but they change in ways that are cool. You spend less time making a PowerPoint deck and crunching, you know, figuring out some data irregularity and spend more time coaching that initiative owner on how to make the procurement initiative more impactful.

43:08Tomer Slaney: That's cool. And so I think what we found at all levels of our transformation office from the most junior person all the way to the chief transformation officer, him or herself, the role is different. The tools are different. The underlying core job of changing humans is not different, but you go about it in a different way. And that way is generally more fun and exciting and allows people of all 10 years to have more impact quicker. So that to me is my down arrow on what the gentrification has done for TOs. And I suspect we see that in other areas of corporations as well. Wonderful. Tomer, Chase, thank you so much for taking the time with us today.

43:44Tomer Slaney: This is a great conversation. Thank you. Thanks for having us. And thank you to all of our listeners for joining us today. We hope you enjoyed the conversation and we welcome your feedback and ideas for future episodes. Just email us at itsr at mckenzie.com. You can also share your ratings and reviews on any podcast player with many thanks to all who've already done so. We appreciate all the comments and feedback we receive each week and encourage you to please keep them coming. And if you enjoyed this episode and you'd like to subscribe, you can easily follow our weekly series on any podcast player, where you can also access our entire library of more than 320 episodes.

44:19Tomer Slaney: Finally, if you'd like to automatically receive our latest publications and insights, we encourage you to visit our transformation practice page at mckenzie.com slash MT, as well as our strategy and corporate finance practice page at mckenzie.com slash SCF. You can also connect with us on LinkedIn, and we've included links for all of those in the show notes today. Thanks again for listening. We look forward to having you join us again next week inside the Strategy Room.