McKinsey & Company partners with AppliedAI to drive agentic AI in regulated sectors
McKinsey & Company, a global management consulting firm, has inked a partnership with UAE-based AppliedAI aimed at driving the adoption of agentic AI in regulated sectors.
The partnership combines the transformation capabilities of McKinsey & Company, the AI depth of QuantumBlack (a McKinsey subsidiary), and the so-called Agentic Process Execution (APX) platform from Opus to help joint clients deploy and manage their agentic AI workforce.
Agentic AI is considered the next era of AI, comprising AI systems that can independently plan, make decisions, and take actions – in effect mimicking human behaviour. Unlike traditional AI, which mainly responds to prompts, agentic AI can break down tasks, use tools, and adapt its approach over time to complete more complex, multi-step objectives.
Research from McKinsey & Company shows that 62% of organisations are experimenting with AI agents, but they still have a way to go in terms of operationalisation: only 23% have scaled an agentic system inside their enterprise. The research identifies execution – the ability to translate model capability into governed, auditable, production-grade workflows – as the main bottleneck.
This is where the partnership with AppliedAI comes in. Its platform enables organisations to discover, build, run, optimise, and govern agentic workflows across departments and teams. Importantly, Agentic Process Execution is model-agnostic, meaning it can be used across different LLM models.
Building the agentic AI workforce
“Our collaboration with AppliedAI addresses the need for an agentic solution for mid- and back-office workflows,” said Ben Ellencweig, Global Lead for QuantumBlack Partnerships and Alliances at McKinsey & Company. “It also introduces new tools that support the enterprise AI roadmap, rapidly uncovers business requirements, and reimagines workflows that accelerate our AI efforts.”
Under the collaboration, McKinsey will lead the identification and reimagination of workflows, working together with business and technical stakeholders at client organisations. AppliedAI then provides the platform on which those reimagined workflows are built, deployed, and continuously improved, with McKinsey ensuring that operating model changes and the governance required to run agentic systems are embedded within the organisation.
“This collaboration delivers what our clients are asking for: a way to rewire their operations with AI that is governed, auditable, and fast. It brings AI to the profit and loss of our clients,” said Abdellah Iftahy, Senior Partner at McKinsey & Company.
Meanwhile, for AppliedAI, the partnership with the global consulting powerhouse will provide a major boost to its growth ambitions. Headquartered in Abu Dhabi, AppliedAI already serves clients across the Middle East, the Americas, Europe, and Asia – and its platform will now be able to leverage McKinsey’s vast network of AI-adopting business relationships around the world.
Arya Bolurfrushan, Founder and CEO of AppliedAI, said: “We built Opus from first principles for the agentic enterprise, turning decades of process knowledge trapped in documents, tribal memory, and legacy systems into governed, production-ready workflows in minutes. Partnering with McKinsey is how we bring that reimagination to regulated industries at the scale they actually need.”
Earlier this year, McKinsey & Company also signed AI-focused partnerships with OpenAI (United States), HUMAIN (Saudi Arabia), and Wonderful (Netherlands).
