McKinsey and Parloa announce alliance for customer-facing AI technology

New collaboration pairs McKinsey’s deep operations expertise and advanced agentic AI capabilities with Parloa’s AI Agent Management Platform to help enterprises deliver customer service with the help of AI agents.

[New York, Berlin] - October 28, 2026 Agentic CX leader Parloa today announced an alliance with McKinsey & Company aimed at closing the readiness gap keeping most enterprises from successfully managing AI agents in customer conversations. McKinsey teams, including QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey, bring expertise to assess organizational readiness, design and engineer agentic solutions, and shape the technology, governance, and talent frameworks needed for sustainable adoption. Parloa enables customers to build, optimize, and manage AI agents across the full customer lifecycle and all channels, with built-in controls to improve every conversation.  

McKinsey research has found that (opens in a new tab) roughly one-third of enterprises currently do not have the operational governance in place to sustain deployed AI agents. Similarly, when Parloa surveyed CX operators about their confidence in managing AI agents, less than 25% of all respondents said they felt confident in their ability to design and evaluate AI agents.

Through this collaboration, teams can more effectively tailor AI agents across an enterprise’s existing systems, processes, and customer needs, and ensure customer issues are resolved quickly and to a greater degree of satisfaction.

“We built this collaboration to cross the divide between strategy and execution in customer operations,” said Chris Silver, Chief Revenue Officer at Parloa. “McKinsey brings the deep readiness diagnostics and operational expertise, and Parloa brings the agent management platform to support personalized, proactive customer interactions across service channels. We are already jointly advising several large-scale clients in this way, and this formal alliance now positions us to deliver our proven approach to innovative enterprises across the US, Europe, and the rest of the globe."

“Most organizations know they need to move on AI, but few have been able to execute the change management successfully,” said Brian Blackader, Partner at McKinsey. “Our research points to this gap and highlights that many AI projects fail to realize their targeted value. By pairing our operations expertise and QuantumBlack’s AI capabilities with leading enterprise AI companies like Parloa, we can help clients realize improved service quality, customer loyalty, and revenue.”

Parloa’s platform is built with the depth and maturity enterprises need to run agentic CX at scale. It already serves a global roster of Fortune 100 customers and meets the operational rigor required when advising clients on agentic CX solutions. McKinsey Partner, Becca Kleinstein, will speak at Parloa’s WAVE Summit US, (opens in a new tab) November 4-5.

About McKinsey & Company

McKinsey is a global management consulting firm committed to helping organizations accelerate sustainable and inclusive growth. We work with clients across the private, public, and social sectors to solve complex problems and create positive change for all their stakeholders. McKinsey helps organizations transform and optimize their operations, combining deep functional expertise, advanced technologies, and AI-enabled solutions to drive productivity, elevate customer and employee experiences, and deliver sustainable performance improvements.