Dave McCann oversees thousands of humans, as well as an AI agent he named after himself, Digital Dave.
One of the most valuable things the company does is conduct research that includes the company’s customers. This is a big help for McCann, who is IBM Consulting’s global managing partner for transformation, responsible for thousands of clients including Nestlé, Ericsson and Riyadh Airways.
The agent (actually a collection of AI agents and assistants) scans McCann’s calendar for client meetings and creates a list of 10 things to know about each meeting. The goal, McCann told Business Insider, was to free up time for him and his staff to prepare for the meeting.
In the old setup, members of his team worked with him to develop briefing materials and typically held a 30-minute warm-up call before a client meeting.
“Everything is gone,” said McCann, who is tasked with helping transform IBM’s global consulting business, which employs about 150,000 people.
McCann said he typically speaks to about 10 clients a week, so the agent saves him about five hours of prep time.
“We have invested in preparing our clients and now we are able to see more clients,” he said.
release the team
The research agent that McCann and his team began building this fall is based on a tool that the company’s group began developing as part of an annual internal competition.
McCann said agents will look at internal data, what IBM and the client are doing in the market, external data, and account details such as the status of projects and services bought and sold. You can also identify industry trends and customer needs, such as reviewing company annual reports and identifying corresponding services that IBM can provide.
Dave McCann built an AI agent called “Digital Dave.” Provided by IBM Consulting
Digital Dave also saves McCann’s team time, he said, because three or four staff members who previously spent hours compiling insights for prep calls can now focus on other tasks.
“It’s not just about being more efficient, it’s actually about changing the way we work,” McCann said.
An agent’s investigative capabilities are not limited to client reports. McCann also began using the tool to evaluate the hundreds of IBM consulting partners he evaluates each year. The goal, he said, is to make informed decisions and advise executives on their strengths and weaknesses as part of performance reviews.
McCann said the data agents consider could include the services an executive sold and the profits they generated, the training they provided and the impact they had on the development of their teams. Before becoming an agent, he says, his approach probably included a dozen spreadsheets and ended up with “the worst pivot table of my life.”
McCann said all the data is now fed into the model, allowing it to ask pointed questions and create queries about the top performers for specific parameters.
“The synergistic effect”
McCann said one of the benefits of building agents is that the IBMers who develop them can share them with other members of their teams and with the broader company, “so there’s instant synergy.”
He says many of his direct reports are working as agents. McCann said there is healthy competition to design the most robust digital aids, especially since employees can build on what their colleagues have created.
Across industries, companies are developing AI agents to take on knowledge work once done by humans, especially tedious tasks. From individual startups to consulting giants, companies use agents across departments such as human resources, IT, finance, communications, and training.
Agents can handle a variety of functions, such as gathering information, processing documents, drafting communications, taking meeting minutes, and conducting research. Although still in their infancy, these systems are quickly becoming a major focus of corporate AI efforts as companies look to turn generative AI into something that can actually relieve employees’ work.
One of the challenges McCann sees for clients and builders is access to data. IBM Consulting’s most advanced clients (perhaps Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies) may have given access to data to a few hundred people, but not to 5,000 people in finance or 10,000 people in human resources, McCann said. Concerns about security and how innovation is managed can be obstacles.
Until data is unlocked, individual employees may be able to get more done, but “you won’t get the productivity multiplier,” he says.
For McCann’s job, Digital Dave means getting important time back on his calendar.
“While business operations are becoming more digital, we are now able to give more focused attention to our clients and humans,” he said.