For a long time, working on consulting projects required creating tons of slides.
At McKinsey, AI has helped consultants reduce their reliance on PowerPoint.
Kate Smaje, global leader for technology and AI at McKinsey, told Business Insider that she saw PowerPoint usage drop significantly within a few months as employees started using AI tools to vibe-code. Both in the number of presentations you create and the amount of time you use the program.
In addition to presenting to clients, consultants often use PowerPoint as a project management tool. This is a working document that serves as an up-to-date summary of recent research and next steps and is sent to clients at the end of each week.
McKinsey consultants created a new approach: an AI-assisted website that serves as a central project hub for clients and the McKinsey team.
Louis-Charles Genereux, an engagement manager at McKinsey, built a website he calls a “client visualization hub” for a current project with a North American cable company.
The project involves approximately 70 people who need to receive information in real time. Previously, Genereux managed it through a slide deck approach. But it wasn’t without its problems, he says.
Once the deck was submitted, version control issues began. As updates are added and shared in email threads, multiple versions may be in circulation, and people working with different versions of the material may have different understandings of the work.
Scrolling through hundreds of PowerPoint slides also wasn’t the most organized way to find information.
“A traditional problem that I often faced, especially as an early engagement manager, was that I would go into meetings and mention it, and other people would miss it,” Genereux said.
AI websites solve this problem by making the latest work more searchable, structured, and available in one place.
Genereux said this has saved the team time and reduced the disconnect between engineering teams, product owners and senior leadership. “Everyone sees exactly the same thing, regardless of their knowledge or skills.”
Creating a website
To create the website, Généreux used Platform McKinsey, the consulting firm’s internal self-service store of approved products. He found an implementation product that allowed him to securely host his site and keep it live.
The team had a repository of “dozens” of HTML files containing analytics, visuals, tables, and text that they helped package into the site’s interactive web pages using AI.
It was then launched through a company-approved system using McKinsey credentials on Cloudflare, with access restricted to only project stakeholders.
AI also helps keep your website up to date. As the project progresses, the site is updated in real time, and at the end of the week the system generates a podcast-style summary and notes for people to consume.
Louis-Charles Genereux, engagement manager at McKinsey & Co., said: McKinsey
Genereux said PowerPoint isn’t gone, but it’s now more of a final output for presentations, emails, notes, etc. than a place for consultants to sign in and get their work done for the day.
He says the actual work is increasingly being done with AI tools, where consultants perform analysis, question your thinking, and translate that work into the format you need.
AI is the “lifeline” of consulting work
The consulting industry is at the center of the AI shift sweeping across the workplace. Leading companies such as McKinsey, BCG, Deloitte, and IBM are advising businesses on how to implement AI while leveraging technology to overhaul their operations.
This shift raises questions about consulting pricing models, talent, training, and where value is created, especially as agents now take on knowledge tasks once performed by humans.
Earlier this year, McKinsey CEO Bob Sternfels said the company’s workforce consists of 40,000 people and 25,000 AI agents. Five months later, Smaje told Business Insider that the number of agents is already “many times that amount” and that AI is becoming part of the “lifeblood” of McKinsey’s system.
This shift is nothing new, she said, explaining that consultants’ value has long been more than just producing research, and the profession has been changing even before the AI wave arrived. Their value lies in judgment, pattern recognition, conceptual problem solving and helping clients act on answers, she said.
What AI is doing now, Smaje continued, is shedding light on where and how value is actually created for clients and speeding up the entire process.
At McKinsey, AI accelerated the early problem-solving cycle, turning what was a team’s “week one answer” (the first hypothesis after a week of research and analysis) into an “hour one answer.”
This eliminates the need for consultants to wait days for direction and allows them to spend more time testing deeper parts of the problem tree, Smaje said.
In fact, Genereux said the team is using the extra time to hold “dojo sessions and hackathons” several times a week to explore ideas that would have been far-fetched at the time.
“We now have the time to do it and the tools to quickly decide whether it’s worth considering,” he said.