How some companies are using AI agents: McKinsey for client onboarding, insurer Nsure to handle customer requests, and Accenture to support its marketing team
Context & Ripple Effects
McKinsey had already partnered with Cohere to help enterprise clients adopt generative AI; its use of agents in onboarding shows that push reaching a core internal workflow. McKinsey's Cohere partnership came as consulting firms were seeing stronger demand for AI advisory work.
The examples also fit later coverage in which companies primarily used agents for efficiency and cost reduction rather than top-line growth. The gap between agent hype and operational use makes these bounded, workflow-specific deployments more significant than broad autonomous-AI claims.
First-order effects
- McKinsey can apply agents to client onboarding, while Nsure directs them toward customer requests and Accenture toward marketing support; each deployment puts agents alongside teams handling recurring business work.
- The immediate test is operational: these companies must determine where agents can reliably assist or handle requests within their existing workflows.
Second-order effects
- Consulting, insurance, and marketing peers face pressure to identify similarly repeatable workflows where agent support can improve responsiveness or staff productivity.
- The value shifts toward integrating agents into business processes, not merely deploying general-purpose models—an advantage for providers and operators with access to the relevant workflows and data.
Third-order effects
- If these narrow deployments prove durable, enterprise AI adoption is likely to advance through embedded, task-specific agents rather than wholesale replacement of business functions.
- Consultancies may increasingly sell implementation experience built from their own operations, reinforcing the link between AI advisory services and practical workflow deployment.
The trend: AI agents are moving from general generative-AI experimentation into bounded operational workflows where enterprises can measure usefulness and control risk.