While artificial intelligence is reshaping McKinsey's workforce, the company's top executives said there are still fundamental human skills that cannot be realized by AI models.
Bob Sternfels, global managing partner at McKinsey, spoke at the conference about how AI is changing the way the firm works. home appliance show Tuesday in Las Vegas.
Sternfels said that McKinsey saved 1.5 million hours in search and synthesis in the last year alone by implementing AI, and that AI models are ideal for this task. He also said McKinsey has 25,000 AI agents who are good at charting, with 2.5 million people creating charts in the past six months.
He said agents are taking over some of that work, allowing consultants to “move up the hierarchy” and work on “more complex problems.”
Given these changes, Sternfels said McKinsey looked at what skills new graduates will need in an AI-driven world from the perspective of major employers. He cited three things: ambition, good judgment, and true creativity.
ability to set aspirations
“What can't models do? Set your aspirations. Set your aspirations right,” he said. “Would you go to low Earth orbit? Would you go to the moon? Would you go to Mars? That's a uniquely human ability.”
Sternfels said people should strive to develop skills that focus on having aspirations and convincing others to believe in those aspirations.
judgement
“There's no right or wrong answer to these models, so how do you set the right parameters?” He said adding humans can build skills to set the architecture based on factors such as corporate values and social norms.
true creativity
“The model is an inferential model, the next most likely step,” Sternfels said.
Humans, on the other hand, have an advantage when it comes to “orthogonal” work, the ability to think outside existing patterns and arrive at entirely new approaches.
Changes in the way companies search for talent
Sternfels added that AI is also changing the way companies look for talent, and it doesn't really matter where you went to school.
For people with technology backgrounds, he said that instead of looking at where they graduated from, potential employers should look to GitHub, a site that engineers use to showcase their work.
“Let's really get into the meat,” he said, “and does that actually start to mean that a wider range of people can enter the workforce through different routes?”
