The threat of artificial intelligence taking away many jobs previously done by humans is realistic, and reports are now emerging every day showing how new technology is changing the workforce.
One job cited in various reports, especially as threatened with being replaced by AI, is the work of analysts. A new report from the Wall Street Journal reveals that global consulting firm McKinsey is experiencing “existential transformation.” This is because artificial intelligence can now perform most of the work that the company's highly paid consultants did within minutes.
Artificial intelligence is seen as a huge threat within the company, and is reportedly a conversation topic at every board meeting, changing the way the company works with clients, how it recruits, and even which projects it is working on.
Bob Sternfels, McKinsey's global management partner, said the company is rapidly deploying thousands of AI agents to help consultants build PowerPoint decks, take notes, summarise interviews and research documents.
“Do you think this exists for our profession? Yes, that's right,” Kate Sumaje, senior partner in McKinsey's major AI initiatives, told WSJ.
“I think that's an existential good thing for us,” Sumaje added.
Elon Musk on why AI will replace consultants:
Xai CEO Elon Musk said that in opposition to the popular tide, AI is not going to replace consultants, given that it is being deployed primarily to confirm decisions CEOs are already trying to take.
In response to a post on X (formerly Twitter) citing the WSJ report, Musk wrote:
“AI can't replace it yet,” Musk added.
Musk's Xai also runs an AI chatbot called Grok, competing with Gemini, ChatGpt, Claude and others in the artificial intelligence race. The chatbot received its final model update a few weeks ago, suddenly beginning to show his love for Adolf Hitler, and later became involved in many controversies when he tried to toe Musk's line on political issues. Xai later attributed these issues to deprecated code and issued fixes to resolve the issue.
For the past few days, Musk has been promoting a new Grok feature that allows you to generate videos using a text prompt called “Imagine.” This feature is similar to the SORA model with Openai and Google's VEO3
