The redoubtable economist Robert Solow once quipped that you could see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics. Of course, he made that observation in 1987, nearly ten years before companies boosted the productivity of US labor by combining managerial innovation with information technology in an effort to focus on a growing class of economic activities called interactions.

New McKinsey research shows that the nature of US economic activity is shifting again—away from the simpler, rule-based interactions that companies automated during the last half of the 1990s and toward more complex interactions requiring high levels of judgment and deep experience.

The rise of complex interactions will once again bring technology center stage, though not as the kind of labor substitute that fueled the productivity gains of the late 1990s. This time technology will complement the way highly skilled workers—who now make up roughly 40 percent of the US labor market—perform their jobs, by helping them to recognize complex patterns, to solve novel problems, and to manage interpersonal and group dynamics.

Technology, in and of itself, rarely makes labor more productive; managerial innovations are also necessary. As Bradford C. Johnson, James M. Manyika, and Lareina A. Yee point...