Bonus Episode: The Agentic Organisation: How AI–Human Collaboration Is Redefining Work, Leadership, and Performance (with Sandra Durth)
As we begin a new year, it’s natural to reflect on what’s changed - and what’s quietly no longer fit for purpose.
AI investment is accelerating at pace, and autonomous and semi-autonomous agents are moving from experimentation to everyday work. And yet, many organisations are still operating with leadership models, workforce structures, and planning assumptions designed for a world where humans were the only actors in the system.
In this episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast, David Green is joined by Sandra Durth, Partner at McKinsey & Company, to explore what happens when work is no longer just human-to-human, but human-to-agent - and what that means for the future of organisations.
Drawing on McKinsey’s latest research, Sandra shares her perspective on:
How AI-human symbiosis is reshaping the very definition of work
Why traditional hierarchies and leadership models are starting to break down
What “agentic leadership” really looks like in practice
The implications for performance, management capability, and strategic workforce planning
The biggest opportunities - and the biggest risks - HR leaders need to be paying attention to right now
Research links:
The agentic organization: Contours of the next paradigm for the AI era
[0:00:00] David Green: Hi, I'm David Green, and you're listening to the Digital HR Leaders podcast. Firstly, Happy New Year. I wish each of you a happy, healthy, and successful 2026. As with every start of the year, we reflect on the year gone by, what changed, what surprised us, and what that might mean for the year ahead. If you step back and look at the state of work over the past year, there's a paradox starting to emerge. On the one hand, organisations are investing heavily in AI, driven by the promise of speed, scale, and productivity. On the other hand, many of the ways we organise work, the roles we design, the hierarchies we rely on, even how we define leadership, still reflect a world that assumed humans were the only actors in the system. That tension is becoming harder to ignore. And that raises a more fundamental question for HR, not just how we adopt AI, but what kind of organisations we're actually building as we do so. So, what happens when people work alongside agents? How quickly do those dynamics spread across the organisation? And what does all of this mean for leadership, performance and workforce planning?
These are exactly the issues I'm exploring today with my guest, Sandra Durth, partner at McKinsey & Company. Sandra works at the intersection of technology, organisational transformation and people management. And in today's conversation, we explore how the very definition of work is changing, what it means to lead when managers are increasingly leading agents as well as people, where this leaves strategic workforce planning, and the risks and opportunities HR leaders need to be paying close attention to right now. So, without further ado, let's get the conversation started.
Sandra, welcome to the show. To kick things off, can you tell us a little bit about your background and your current role at McKinsey?
[0:02:05] Sandra Durth: Thank you so much, David, for having me. I'm also super-delighted to be here, and it's always such a pleasure to talk to you. As you mentioned, I'm a partner. I've been with McKinsey for 17 years, and I like to say I do the people side of business transformation, so anything that has to do with making companies more sustainably high-performing, by making sure they tackle the hardest topics really well, which is obviously all of the human and organisational topics. Had the pleasure in the past three years of focusing a little bit more on the intersection of tech transformation and people and organisations. So, I lead our work around the next era of work and the agentic organisation. So, it's been a really wild and fun ride these past three years.
[0:02:49] David Green: Oh, that's brilliant. And we're going to dig into that a lot. I think it's a perfect episode to kick off 2026 because everyone's talking about agentic AI. We know that it's not just about technology. We know it's very much a people transformation that we need to think about as well. And when we last connected, Sandra, you'd just published a powerful article on the future of people management in a world of tech disruption and instability. Since then, it seems that the pace of change has only accelerated. From your perspective, what's changed since then and what's stayed the same?
[0:03:23] Sandra Durth: I love the fact that you ask about what's stayed the same. I was in Sydney with an executive's team earlier this week and one of the executives said he just read a children's book to his kid. And one of the quotes there was, "As everything around us changes, we have to hold on to what's constant". And so, let me actually start with what's stayed the same. The three theses of the research you mentioned that we did a year ago, and then published earlier this year, were one, technology democratises; two, technology unlocks opportunities to reduce friction; and three, in a world with more technology at work, we actually have to hold on to what is human. And I actually think those three things hold. We are still human, humans still want to work, humans still want to find meaning and purpose at work, humans still want to find a sense of belonging at work. So, humans are still humans, so I think that's stayed the same.
I think the pace and scale and scope of innovation surprised me. So, if you're reading the article, which again was published earlier this year, while those theses are still the same, I think we are surprised by how much change has happened this year. A couple of things that I find particularly striking, one is the level of polarisation of the discourse. You know, you get everything from, "AGI will take over the human race", to, "No, technology will unlock the next S-curve of productivity and livelihoods for everyone and will be the great equaliser". And there's a lot of story, a lot of noise, and it's really hard to find the signal through that noise. So, I think that's one thing that's changed, the polarisation of the narrative.
The other thing that's probably evolved is that we are seeing some organisations really leading while others are waiting. And to some extent, that delta between the leaders and the laggards has continued to increase over the year.
[0:05:35] David Green: How is there a paradigm shift in thinking? Are you seeing this reshape the very definition of what we call work?
[0:05:43] Sandra Durth: That's a great question. And I think there's definitely work we will no longer need to do, right? But there will still be work that needs to happen in order to create value. So, there will still be work. I think one of the paradigm shifts is around who will be doing that work? Is it a human or is it technology, or is it at that beautiful intersection of augmentation, where humans augmented by technology can actually work better, more effectively, more productively? I think the paradigm shift is this technology feels more human-like than prior technologies. It's a technology that is non-deterministic. You ask it a question and you get a different answer every time. It's a technology that can do ever more complicated tasks. So, if you play the game forward, and right now the technology is often still clunky, it hallucinates, it has bias, so it's not there yet, but it's evolving very rapidly; so, if you play the game forward, you have a technology that can act like a human. You have knowledge at the press of a button, at the cost of compute; you have a technology that actually can be creative; you have a technology that doesn't just execute what a human tells it to, but that it can actually decide, it can coordinate, it can improve; it's a technology that actually learns like humans learn. And so, I think that's really the heart of the paradigm shift.
What excites me about that is the potential for radical innovation. With technologies like this, we don't know what those business problems, the unknown unknowns are that this technology might solve. We're starting to see glimpses of it. There was research at Stanford where a team of agents actually found a COVID vaccine that was better, much faster than human researchers did. And so, some of those innovations, those are exciting, those problems we can't even imagine today, that the technology might solve. So, the paradigm shift to me is that agentic to some extent brings autonomous progress.
[0:08:00] David Green: How fast do you think this change, this transformation will happen?
[0:08:04] Sandra Durth: Yeah, and like so much with this, I think there's lots of opinions. And again, back to the polarisation, there's opinions on exponential growth and flattening off. Typically, as humans, we overestimate short-term effects and underestimate long-term transformative potential. So, my assumption is if history repeats itself, the same thing will happen with this technology, too. It's faster than anything I've ever seen. So, what are we? It's now November. So, three years since the birth of ChatGPT, it's now in more than 50% of US households, it reached 100 million users within two months. That's unheard of speed of adoption, because it's so mass compatible. So, I do think it is going to happen faster. And I think it's good that there are some rate limiters, because there's so many risks to manage, unintended secondary consequences to think about. The same technology that creates light and warmth also creates the nuclear bomb. And I think we have a role as humans to make sure we balance speed and progress with mitigating risks and uncertainties.
[0:09:23] David Green: That's very helpful. And most of the people that listen to this show, Sandra, are working in or around the HR space, either practitioners themselves or consultants supporting the HR field or technology vendors, I guess, for building products that help us deliver people practices hopefully more efficiently and more effectively, and give a personalisation to employees that are using them as well. So, we're going to look at three things now in the next set of questions. One is organisational models; second is around leadership and how that's potentially changing; and then, the third one, strategic workforce planning, which is always a topic we love to talk about on this show. So, let's start with organisational models, Sandra. So, what kind of organisational models are you starting to see emerge from this kind of AI-human symbiosis?
[0:10:13] Sandra Durth: So, you mentioned the industrial age. So, let's go back in history a little bit on management theory. And one of the theories is, why did corporations actually even come into existence? It's because the free market with individual trading with individual, it had a lot of transaction costs, because you had to contract between lots of people all the time. And so, corporations formed in order to remove some of that free market transaction costs. Now, in today's age, there's actually more friction within bureaucratic organisations, because they've grown to be so big and so large than the transaction costs of the free market. So, maybe that's kind of one look back in history.
The other look back in history is original management theory of these organisations, you were very much an organisation as a machine. You optimised it like a machine, you had levers, and you pull them, and you just get more efficient and effective. When Katz and Kahn came with systems theory, said, "That works really well when things are predictable. But what happens when things are unpredictable, when they're complicated, when they're changing rapidly, is that you cannot optimise any more the way you did before. And so, systems need to become more fluid, more organic, in order to rapidly adjust to changes". And I think we definitely agree that we're in an uncertain, complex environment where things are changing all the time and we don't really know what the future will hold. And so, that way of organising with command and control and an assumed predictability is no longer the way that we can organise in this world. And so, what needs to happen is more of a construct of the organisation, not as a structure, but as a system, maybe even as an ecosystem, where things can course-adjust more rapidly.
The other point to this is that what agents can do and when agents organise end-to-end workflows is they take out breaking points. So, often when you have cross-functional work, there's breaking points where sales hands over to marketing, right, or marketing hands over to sales, and there's always human transaction costs in those things. And agents take out the handoffs. And so, theoretically, and again, theoretically, you get to a much more outcome-oriented system that's more fluid, more flexible, and can more rapidly reorient resources to value. Now, in practice, that's not where we're at yet, right? In practice, AI native organisations, so some of the innovators we're seeing, they're having a really hard time scaling. And in practice, larger organisations that, you know, it's still the human that's accountable and that's complying and that has to sign. And so, in practice, you still have to have humans involved. And so, that balance between how much human oversight do you need for what type of work and speed and adaptability, that's the new org design paradigm that I don't think there's a best practice for yet. It's like everyone's trying to find that sweet spot and evolve as things go.
[0:13:37] David Green: Let's move to leadership. Traditional leadership is also being flipped on its head a little bit. As managers start leading more agents, what does this mean for how we define leadership, how we train managers, and maybe even how we measure performance as well?
[0:13:54] Sandra Durth: So, let's start with managers, and managers have gotten a really bad rap, in these large organisations, where bureaucracy has kind of created more friction and transaction costs than the free market, then it was solved for the free market, where maybe there's a reputation that managers create output and not value. In the future, there's actually two schools of thought. The school of thought one is there'll be less managers because you actually don't need managers anymore, you have leaders who lead this hybrid system. And there's another school of thought, which says, "Actually, no, everyone will be a manager", because you're taking away kind of the individual contributor tasks through agentic, and everyone ends up managing a system.
I like the latter, right? So, this entire construct around leading in this new age actually requires the ability to design systems for valuable outcomes, which means you need to have judgment, you need to understand the domain, you need to build trust in technology, because as we have discussed, humans will still be part of the system, you have to have judgment, know when you need to quality control. What's interesting, there's research that good people managers are also good agent managers, because the same things that people need agents need. They need a clear task, they need to understand the outcome they're working towards, they need to have clear instructions, you need to have a good sensing mechanism, "When do I have to quality control because the output doesn't look right?" You need to then train the human or the agentic system to correct and to learn and to evolve over time. Management of the two, human, agent, or hybrid system is actually quite similar, and the skills required to do that are quite similar too, and their socio-emotional and higher cognitive skills. And so, the manager of the future will require those.
[0:15:58] David Green: So, I suppose that's two elements there instead of management. There's the management of the work, which applies, I guess, for a point, you're saying good people managers at managing work tend to be good agent managers as well. And then, there's the people management piece, which obviously presumably just applies to people rather than agents in terms of managing their behaviours, their emotion, their performance, etc?
[0:16:21] Sandra Durth: I don't know. I mean, you also manage agent performance, right? So, to your question on how is performance management changing some of the kind of front running organisations that in certain functions already have hybrid work, managers are incentivised for the system outcomes. And so, if you're not training your agentic system to continuously improve and become more effective, efficient, and make less mistakes, then you're also not being a good manager. So, I actually don't know if it's that different.
[0:16:53] David Green: Okay, that's an interesting concept. It's one to think through.
[0:16:58] Sandra Durth: Maybe just because you also asked about leadership and distinguishing that from kind of managing work, and in particular the leadership suite of the organisations I work with. Leading in today's time is really hard, right, because you're shaping a world that you cannot imagine, and you're continuously juggling these paradoxes, right? There's so much uncertainty, but you need to have a bold vision that you rally people behind. You need to unlock productivity, because it's a right to play, but you also have to think about, how do I unleash innovation because that's my competitive advantage of the future? You need to experiment and you need to avoid unintended risks and consequences. And so, I think leading right now is really, really hard. There's no playbook, there's no benchmark, there's no best practice. So, maybe to the leaders out there, I think everyone feels that way. You're not alone.
[0:18:01] David Green: No, I think you're absolutely right there, Sandra. You mentioned earlier, before we get to a workforce planning piece, you mentioned earlier the leaders are, you know, you see a situation where some of the leaders are using AI as organisations are pulling away from the laggards a little bit. What are the leaders doing differently in your experience?
[0:18:21] Sandra Durth: Yeah, I think they're probably managing those polarities that I just mentioned a little bit better. One, I think what's really helpful is if the executive team has an aligned vision and boundary conditions on what the potential of that technology is for the specific organisation. Is it disruptive? Is it going to change my competitive advantage? What is my competitive advantage and how do I create entry barriers around it? How fast do I want to go? What are the trade-offs I'm willing to make? Where do I invest in people? Where do I invest in technology? So, if you have an aligned executive team, which takes time and dialogue and it takes AI fluency, which sometimes leadership teams don't have themselves, I think that's one aspect to the leader leading organisations.
The second I already mentioned is that they typically have a higher learning organisation quotient. So, they're more trained in being flexible and doing stuff differently and trying again and experimenting and learning their way forward. The third thing is that deliberate investment into tech and human at the same time. Maybe provocatively, I think one of our articles said, "For every dollar invested in technology, you should invest hive in people". That's because ultimately, the value capture comes from humans working differently. And those organisations that just throw tools over the fence, expecting current activities to suddenly be done differently, versus those organisations that really reshape how work happens with the full potential of technology, sometimes it's not even agents, right? Sometimes Gen AI is the right answer or RPA, right? But those organisations that really rewire work with a full tech toolkit, and designing that work, realising that there's still a human somewhere and that human wants to be doing meaningful work for an organisational purpose and calling that they believe in, that's the third thing that leading organisations are doing really well.
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From an HR perspective, again, if we think that most people listening to this episode are working in HR, what are those leading organisations maybe doing differently from an HR perspective, maybe a Chief People Officer, but maybe the HR function itself, what are they doing differently? Presumably they're involved in this rather than being a bystander.
[0:22:12] Sandra Durth: You cannot make these types of decisions if you don't have the enterprise view at the table, right? So, this is not a technology decision. As you said, it's not a tech transformation, it's a people transformation. So, you kind of need to have the representation of the people at the table. What are leading HR functions doing? One, they have a fact base on the disruptive potential for the organisation at large. So, they really have an enterprise view, like a heat map, domains, job families, locations, how fast could this theoretically go, where is it automation, where is it augmentation, so that they can shape the decisions on what do we do first, what do we do second? It's really hard to do that if you don't have facts. So, that enterprise-wide fact base.
The second thing leading organisations or HR organisations are doing is they're going on their own journey, right, so doing the HR for HR work, because it's really hard to be credible on workforce transformation, on technology, if you haven't actually done technological transformation yet, and the best place to do it is for the HR function itself, which might take us to strategic workforce planning in a second, but also other places like HR operations. There's really no reason why a lot of that still has to be done by humans. The third thing is that HR leaders that are involved where there is actually already a domain disruption, so some domains like the tech function or customer care, they're probably some of the functions that this technology is already very mature in. And so, the HR function needs to be involved in that domain transformation also. And what that helps the HR function do is really think about all of the HR products from acquisition, like whom do we hire, why do we hire? We actually hire for learning muscle rather than expertise. How would you performance manage, to your question? So, rethinking all of those HR products within that domain, because that's then your replicable methodology for all of the additional transformations that will happen. So, that is like the co-pilot to the business transformation part.
Then, the last thing, skilling, skilling, skilling from the executive team, right? You have to take your top team on the journey. But then also, if we acknowledge that the skill of the future will be the AI fluency and AI complementary skills, one of the biggest worries I have is, are we bringing people along quickly enough? So, really investing into those skill categories and not getting distracted in maybe the complexity of disaggregating everyone into micro skills. No, it's the meta skills. Those are the ones that everyone will need, so let's build those and let's build those quickly.
[0:25:17] David Green: And I guess as well with HR, I mean, we don't just have a responsibility to help the organisation become AI-fluent and develop those AI complementary skills that you just mentioned, Sandra, we need to do it to ourselves as well. So, the HR leadership team need to role-model, the HR business partners need to bring themselves up to speed, all HR professionals also need to be AI fluent, don't they?
[0:25:41] Sandra Durth: Yes, everyone does. And HR, unfortunately, I think together with legal, it's typically the function with the least tech fluency. So, back to the HR for HR, how are you going to accompany this workforce transformation if you're not investing in yourself and your capabilities? I fully agree with you.
[0:25:59] David Green: Very good point. Well, we're going to get to strategic workforce planning now.
[0:26:01] Sandra Durth: Your favourite topic.
[0:26:03] David Green: It is. It is at the moment, I think.
[0:26:05] Sandra Durth: Not just yours. It's always a question, right?
[0:26:08] David Green: It might be one of yours as well, I think. What about strategic workforce planning? With so much changing in the world of work, and it will continue to change, all predictions suggest that as well, where does this leave strategic workforce planning? And again, maybe as a second part to that question, Sandra, what do you see leading organisations doing around strategic workforce planning that others could learn from?
[0:26:30] Sandra Durth: So, I very provocatively the other day at a roundtable said, "Strategic workforce planning is dead", and everyone looked at me with shock in their face. And I go, "That's not what I mean, not like dead, dead". But if you decompose those three words, 'strategic', in the past it meant, you know, we're going to have a five-year strategy, we're going to grow by 3%, we have quite some certainty. Now, the scenarios for what 2030 holds are so broad. Even if you just take something like technological adoption, how quickly can we go, the delta in your five-year strategy is going to be huge, right? So, yes, translating strategy into people implications still needs to happen, but it's not a point answer. It's going to be a range of answers and you have to think a lot more around scenarios.
The second word, 'workforce', so in the past, we modelled human gearing ratios and human attrition and human retirees and the demand for humans and roles of the future. But now, don't you actually have to think about what is the work to be done in that reimagined world of the future? If I decompose that work to be done into activities, what are my choices of where I give that to technology automated; what is the augmented part where I need tech and people; and where do I need human capacity and capability? So, workforce suddenly becomes defined as digital and human workforce together. And I don't think any organisation or solution has cracked the modelling of workforce, of technology and people out of one hand. I do think this is why we're seeing more and more of this HR and IT functions merging though, to solve exactly that point, making those decisions, where do we invest in people deliberately, and where do we invest in technology deliberately out of one hand?
Then 'planning', planning's dead, right? Maybe that's the part that's dead. You have to be dynamic, adaptive, you have to sense what trajectory are we on, you have to course adjust, right? I mean, if you're in life sciences or pharma, like MFN, it threw a grenade at your pricing strategy. You could have planned very well, and you would not have been prepared for anything that happened in the past couple of months. And so, I think going away from, again, this trying to find the point solution to being a lot more dynamic, adaptive, building in a sensing mechanism as an organisation. So, maybe what it means is that strategic workforce planning actually needs to be a much more ongoing activity versus part of the strategic cycle. So, yeah, it was being provocative with, "Its dead", but of course it's just actually more important than ever.
To your second question on what do I see great organisations do, I think it's similar to what I mentioned when you asked the HR question. So, they do have an enterprise-wide view of the potential for disruption, they have a view of scenarios and they model for different scenarios. They also make trade-off decisions. So, for example, one of the other things many people are talking about is what if we have no more entry-level roles? Because in the past, the way we apprenticed people is we put them as note-takers into a room, and over time they gained experience. But now, there's no more entry-level roles. Maybe you deliberately need to invest into entry-level roles because you still need them in order to build expertise in the future, so where there are pockets of people investment that in the past weren't investments, but they're still investments today. You can also honestly rethink career ladders and apprenticeship completely, but that's a different topic. So, those organisations are making those very deliberate decisions.
The other thing is, what great organisations on strategic workforce planning are doing is they're releasing a little bit the future picture from the today. Because the way strategic workforce planning happened in the past was often a little bit of improvements building on where we are today, while we think we should become a little bit more productive every year. I have one client that basically said, "Okay, that might be true, but I'm going to build a view of if I blank-sheeted my organisation of the future really with the entire potential of technology in my toolkit, how would I design work, how would I design my organisation?" And yes, maybe there's three scenarios for that, but really releasing yourself from organisational structure, from roles, from boxes and the way things are done today. And then you can still model today to tomorrow and make those choices, how fast do we want to go, how invasive do we want to be? But that releasing yourself from how things are done today, I think few organisations are putting that before the SWP exercise.
[0:31:52] David Green: Sandra, let's talk risk. You mentioned risk earlier. It's obviously great to see some organisations with a rapid rate of scaling of AI. There's obviously a lot of concern around ethics, regulation, explainability; we've touched on all of those so far. Let's think about HR now. What should HR leaders be watching closely for as AI continues to move deeper into people management?
[0:32:20] Sandra Durth: Yeah, and I think those are the right concerns to have. Back to our point on, the technology is still clunky, it's inherently biased because it's trained on human knowledge and human knowledge is inherently biased. There's judgment decisions I wouldn't want technology to make. So, I think that the concerns, the ethics, the regulation, balanced for speed, are extremely important. And of course, that is something that HR leaders bring to the table. There's obviously also just regulatory requirements HR needs to make sure in terms of licence to operate that an organisation follows. So, I do think those are important parts. Getting beyond that, the obvious to kind of next level of thinking, if you are reshaping work human-centrically, where how much judgment do you need, where how do I make choices on what domains I start with, and why how do I communicate to my organisation, to even my societal responsibilities, to my board, like, what's my investment thesis behind all of this? So, I think the communication and building trust in an employer is also an important part to mitigate some populations that will certainly see technology as something that triggers fear and worry. And I think that's completely fair and human. So, that's another big role that HR plays.
I guess what keeps me up at night, as we've already discussed, is the speed, right? So, if we agree that in the long run, technology increases the pie and has the potential to improve livelihoods for humanity and democratise also globally, can we manage the transitions to get there more quickly than technology is evolving? And a lot of that has to do with the skilling part that we already mentioned. And maybe also part of it will be deliberate investment into some populations for a certain part of time that in the past, you mentioned the industrial age, right? When technological evolutions came, people would retire and a young generation would start doing new work. We might not have that luxury. And so, how do we handle that? I think that's what keeps me up. And that's also part of the social responsibility of employers, where HR needs to make sure that is also a topic discussed.
[0:35:00] David Green: So, if you had to call out a few big opportunities and maybe a few big caution flags for 2026, as organisations navigate this new tech/human symbiosis, what would they be?
[0:35:13] Sandra Durth: There's always secondary consequences that we don't think about. Like when social media came, no one thought about what does that do to children and youth and how we interact with each other? So, the caution is around, again, that sensing mechanism on making sure not just we use technology, but we govern and grow with technology and we course correct using judgment and ethics and keeping the human at the centre. So, I think that's certainly one part. I think on the opportunity, and we started there a little bit, if this is the way to unlock autonomous progress, I do think we're going to see more innovation. It feels like a lot of this first wave has been about productivity. I mean, productivity is important, it's a right to play. But I would love to have 2026 be about the right to win and to see some real innovations and step changes and progress happen in some industries.
[0:36:26] David Green: I like that. Focus on growth and innovation rather than productivity. And if you get the growth and innovation, you'll probably get the productivity anyway.
[0:36:33] Sandra Durth: Exactly.
[0:36:35] David Green: And if we were recording this episode in a year's time, and I won't hold you to this, I promise.
[0:36:40] Sandra Durth: Give me a crystal ball, David.
[0:36:43] David Green: As Niels Bohr said, "There's nothing as hard as predicting the future". What do you think we'll be talking about one year from now?
[0:36:50] Sandra Durth: I don't think agentic will be that sexy a word anymore. It was definitely, when we brought out the article, I think it was in February, that was about when agentic started being a topic. It feels like that's now on the decline again, because it'll be a lot more under the hood and implicit. So, I think we'll stop talking about agentic. What might we start talking about? Things like quantum computing, is there back to maybe this potential for innovation and growth? Will technology have found a way to actually work differently within the boundary conditions of our planetary ecosystem? So, can we reduce costs significantly, and then with quantum computing actually really unlock innovation? There's already some discussion around SLMs versus LLMs. Are we going to see more of the smaller, more potent, quicker, cheaper solutions winning? So, I think that's probably one thing, can we remove some of the constraining factors?
The second thing that we're already talking about a little bit now, you'll see also in the report I mentioned, we talk about robots. So, I think humanoid robots, it might be a thing, because then the combination of AI and robotics, it actually unleashes additional opportunities. Yeah, but I'd hope we talk about innovations.
[0:38:19] David Green: Yeah, let's hope so. And a couple of questions to finish, Sandra, both really focus on the HR field. If HR doesn't act now, if it doesn't seize this moment, what's at risk?
[0:38:31] Sandra Durth: Organisations risk losing their competitive edge because ultimately, as always, being sustainably high-performing is what you're solving for, and you can't be sustainably high-performing if you don't leverage technology for its entire potential. And you can't do that if you don't accompany the workforce transformation. So, I do think there might be reshaping of industry structure and conduct. And if you're not playing, then you're by definition lost.
[0:39:06] David Green: And for HR leaders listening, CHROs listening to this, Sandra, and they think, "Okay, I need to act. I need to do something now that I haven't done today", what's the one action that a CHRO could take maybe in the next 90 days to start building an agentic-ready organisation?
[0:39:22] Sandra Durth: Well, if the executive team does not have an aligned view on where the value will be for the business, I think the one thing to do is, go to the West Coast, go to China with your executive team, understand the art of the possible, and have a very honest dialogue on what is the future of our enterprise. If that's already there, then skills, skills, skills, skills, skills. And what I'm talking about is meta skills, right? So, really, really, really invest into making sure everyone has AI fluency, which means they have to work with technology on a day-to-day basis, and all of those complementary skills in terms of judgment, system thinking, etc.
[0:40:11] David Green: Brilliant, what a great way to end. Sandra, it's been an absolute pleasure to speak with you. Thanks again for being a guest on the Digital HR Leaders podcast. Before we part ways, can you share with listeners how they can follow you, find out more about the work you're doing, but also find out what McKinsey's doing for the field as well?
[0:40:29] Sandra Durth: Yeah, of course. So, you can find me on LinkedIn. You can also find me on McKinsey.com under Sandra Durth. And we have continuous refreshed content there. We provide webinars for people to listen to and stuff. Just feel free to reach out.
[0:40:44] David Green: Fantastic. Well, Sandra, I can say, even though we're not there yet, Happy New Year for 2026.
[0:40:44] Sandra Durth: Happy New Year, David.
[0:40:51] David Green: I wish you well for 2026 and look forward to our next conversation. Thanks again for being on the show.
[0:40:57] Sandra Durth: Thanks for having me.
[0:40:59] David Green: That brings us to the end of this episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast. What a great way to start 2026. A huge thank you to Sandra for joining me today, and thank you to our listeners for tuning in. If you found this conversation valuable, please do subscribe to the podcast, share it with your network, and leave us a rating or review. And don't forget to head over to insight222.com, follow us on LinkedIn, and sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter at myHRfuture.com. That's all for now. Thank you for tuning in and we'll be back next week with another episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast. Until then, take care and stay well.