AppliedAI and McKinsey partner to bring agentic AI to regulated enterprises

Abu Dhabi — May 21, 2026. Today we’re announcing a collaboration with McKinsey & Company to help enterprises in regulated industries rewire their mid- and back-office operations with agentic AI. The work brings together Opus, our Agentic Process Execution (APX) platform, with McKinsey’s transformation expertise and the technical capabilities of QuantumBlack — giving clients a faster, governed path from strategy to live production workflows.

The bottleneck has shifted

Recent McKinsey research found that 62 percent of organizations are now running experiments with AI agents, but only 23 percent have managed to scale an agentic system across their enterprise. The gap is no longer about what models can do. It’s about execution — translating model capability into governed, auditable, production-grade workflows that can withstand regulatory scrutiny.

This collaboration is built to close that gap, taking the path from transformation strategy to working operational workflow down from months to weeks.

How it works

Opus lets organizations discover, build, run, and optimise agentic workflows, with a persistent enterprise memory layer that turns every deployment into compounding institutional knowledge. The platform is model-agnostic, orchestrates work across existing enterprise systems, and is built to be owned and evolved by the business stakeholders closest to the work — not just technical teams.

In this collaboration, McKinsey leads the identification and reimagination of high-friction workflows, brings business and technical stakeholders together in new ways made possible by Opus, and embeds the governance and operating model changes needed to run agentic systems at scale. AppliedAI provides the platform on which those reimagined workflows are built, deployed, governed, and continuously improved.

Together, the combined offering accelerates time-to-value and raises the return on agentic process transformation across regulated industries and business process operations.

Proof point: a European chemicals manufacturer

In a joint deployment with a leading European chemicals manufacturer operating under stringent regulatory requirements, we used Opus to transform a vendor onboarding process that had previously been manual, slow, and error-prone. Data was scattered across systems, and progress depended on repeated follow-ups.

By automating data capture, compliance checks, and counterparty communications, the joint deployment delivered:

• A reduction in manual processing effort of more than 99 percent.
• Cycle time compressed from roughly two weeks to under five minutes of active processing.
• Significant gains in data accuracy, compliance posture, and real-time process visibility.

The pattern is designed to repeat at scale across regulated industries: find the workflows where friction is most expensive, reimagine them with the process owners who run them, and rapidly deploy governed agentic processes into production.

What our leaders are saying

“Enterprises spend trillions globally on work that is necessary but procedural. 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, from financial services in New York and London to industrials in Frankfurt to sovereign-scale programmes in the Gulf.”

— Arya Bolurfrushan, Founder and CEO, AppliedAI

“Our collaboration with AppliedAI addresses the need for an agentic solution for mid- and back-office workflows. It also introduces new tools that support the enterprise AI roadmap, rapidly uncovers business requirements and re-imagines workflows that accelerates our AI efforts. This gives clients a governed, auditable path from transformation strategy to operational workflow in weeks, not months.”

— Ben Ellencweig, Global Lead for QuantumBlack Partnerships and Alliances, McKinsey & Company

“AI transformations are often launched with a large ambition. But ambition without execution creates frustration, not value. 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 P&L of the organization.”

— Abdellah Iftahy, Senior Partner, McKinsey & Company; EEMA Business Building Practice Leader, Middle East

About AppliedAI

AppliedAI is the UAE’s AI champion and a global enterprise AI company building Opus, the Agentic Process Execution (APX) platform that lets regulated enterprises discover, build, run, and optimise governed agentic workflows. Headquartered in Abu Dhabi, we serve clients across the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.

About McKinsey & Company

McKinsey is a global management consulting firm committed to helping organizations accelerate sustainable and inclusive growth. The firm works with clients across the private, public, and social sectors to solve complex problems and create positive change for all their stakeholders. Learn more at mckinsey.com.

McKinsey has a financial interest linked to the performance of AppliedAI. This announcement is for informational purposes only and is not — and may not be relied on in any manner as — legal, tax, or investment advice, or as an offer to sell or as solicitation of an offer to buy any interest in any member of the AppliedAI corporate group.