Lawted on McKinsey: AI Is Not an HR Remake

McKinsey has just published an essay titled “Agent-Driven Organizations: How AI Rewrites the Foundations of Human Resources.”

My score after reading it: 65 out of 100.

It finally recognizes that AI is not about bolting a chatbot onto an old process or teaching every employee to write prompts. It is about redefining tasks, capabilities, and accountability. But McKinsey still assumes that the transformation will be planned in meetings by the CEO, CHRO, and CIO, then completed when HR draws a “task–capability–agent” map. That is the logic of traditional enterprise transformation, not the logic of an AI Native Company.

1. The basic unit of an organization is not the task. It is the Skill

McKinsey argues that traditional organizations are built around jobs, while future organizations should be built around tasks. The direction is right, but it stops halfway.

A task is disposable: screen this batch of résumés. A Skill is an organizational capability that can be called, combined, audited, and improved repeatedly: analyze the role, find candidates, screen applications, send invitations, and review the interviews as one complete recruiting capability.

A Skill is therefore not an SOP document or a handful of prompts. It contains context, process, tools, permissions, judgment criteria, deliverables, and an evaluation mechanism.

An SOP tells an employee how to work. A Skill lets an Agent begin working. McKinsey used to replicate organizational capability through consultants and slides. An ANC replicates it through Skills.

2. AI is not an HR tool. It is a new means of production

The essay keeps asking which tasks should go to employees, which should go to AI, and which require human–AI collaboration.

A real ANC has to go further. What identity does the Agent have? Which data may it access? Which tools may it call? Which result does it own? Who takes over when it fails? How can the experience it accumulates be reused by other Agents?

Without identity, permissions, memory, tools, delivery interfaces, and evaluation, an “AI employee” is still only a chat box.

ANC is not about adding a few AI tools to a company. It is about giving the company a new operating system that can coordinate people, Agents, and digital systems.

3. An agent-driven organization is not an HR upgrade

The essay casts the future HR function as the architect of human–Agent collaboration. I think that is too generous to HR.

An agent-driven organization is first a reconstruction of the business delivery system. HR is only one of the functions being reconstructed.

The real path usually does not begin with HR writing a strategic workforce plan and IT deploying Agents afterward. It begins with a real problem on the front line. An FDE enters the field, breaks down the workflow, ships the first working Agent in 48 hours, puts it into real operations, and then uses delivery results to redefine roles, processes, performance, and structure.

HR does not design the future organization first and ask technology to implement it. Agents run inside the business first; organizational policy then catches up with the reality that has already formed.

The future may not produce a stronger CHRO at all. Parts of HR, IT, and operations may merge into a new Organization Engineering or Agent Operations function.

Rebranding the CHRO as a “Chief Human-Agent Resources Architect” feels, at least partly, like extending the life of an old department.

4. Do not begin with a “unified foundation”

McKinsey recommends mapping 10 to 15 end-to-end processes, building a unified people-data foundation and skills system, and establishing cross-functional governance. All of that can be correct. Executed through the traditional consulting playbook, however, it easily becomes another three-year digital-transformation program: six months drawing the blueprint, a year building the platform, and finally a deck plus a system nobody uses.

Lawted’s ANC logic runs in the opposite direction: deliver one real project, then another, then another.

Only after several real projects succeed do the recurring contexts, tools, permissions, workflows, and delivery patterns naturally harden into Skills, a Harness, and enterprise architecture.

Architecture is not imagined before delivery begins. Architecture grows out of repeated delivery.

5. Governance must exist, but it cannot become an excuse for inaction

McKinsey is right to emphasize data governance, permissions, auditability, human review, and model risk. Recruiting, performance, compensation, and termination are high-risk domains.

But governance has to grow in stages.

In 48 hours, prove that the use case creates real value, with humans covering the gaps. In 48 days, stabilize the workflow and add permissions, logs, exception handling, and human review. In 48 months, address cross-organizational governance, long-term maintenance, and systemic risk.

If a demo must satisfy the governance standard of a multinational corporation in 2035 on day one, it will probably never go live.

The point is not to remove governance. Governance must grow with business risk and system scale.

6. The real question is not whether to hire 20 fewer people

McKinsey describes a company that planned to hire 20 planners, then decomposed the work so a smaller number of new hires, internal transfers, outside experts, and AI Agents could do it together.

That still only optimizes the existing organization.

ANC asks a more fundamental question. If knowledge, coordination, execution, and management can all be encoded as Skills, why does the company still need so many permanent roles and management layers? Why must every capability be acquired through full-time employment? Could a small core team dynamically call Agents, external experts, and project-based talent instead?

McKinsey is discussing how AI can reallocate the workforce of a large company.

ANC is asking whether a company whose capabilities can be called on demand still needs to grow into the shape it has today.

My final judgment is that the essay can help a traditional CEO understand that AI is not a shopping list of tools. It requires changing processes, metrics, and accountability.

But it remains three steps away from a true AI Native Company: from tasks to executable and reusable Skills; from HR allocating AI to FDEs building human–Agent delivery systems in the field; and from optimizing the existing organization to questioning jobs, departments, management layers, and even the boundary of the firm.

McKinsey wants to use AI to redesign human resources.

ANC wants to redesign the company itself.

Put more sharply: McKinsey can already see AI dismantling the old organization, yet it is still carefully debating what promotion HR should receive inside it.