This is a case interview question. If a 40,000-employee consulting firm adds 25,000 AI agents to its workforce within two years, how will its competitive advantage change?
It may not be long before McKinsey & Company asks job candidates such questions, but first the firm is trying to answer them itself.
The company's CEO, Bob Sternfels, recently said on an episode of Harvard Business Review's Ideacast that the company is rapidly reinventing itself around artificial intelligence.
At the latest count, the company currently has 60,000 employees, including 40,000 people and 20,000 agents, he said.
Speaking at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week, he said the number of AI agents McKinsey uses is actually closer to 25,000. A McKinsey spokesperson confirmed to Business Insider that this number is the most accurate.
Sternfels said on the podcast that just a year and a half ago, the company was using only a few thousand agents, but within the next year and a half, he expects every employee to be “supported by at least one agent or more.”
AI agents are generally defined as virtual assistants that can complete tasks autonomously. Analyze problems, outline plans, and take actions without prompting from you.
The rapid deployment of agents at McKinsey reflects an industry-wide move to incorporate generative AI into various aspects of consultants' daily work.
Companies from Boston Consulting Group to PwC offer everything from slide decks and advisory work to Multi-year AI-driven transformation projectadds new tools to greatly increase efficiency.
QuantumBlack has a team of 1,700 people and powers all of McKinsey's AI initiatives, currently accounting for 40% of the firm's work, Alex Singla, a senior partner at McKinsey and co-leader of QuantumBlack, told Business Insider.
As part of that effort, Singla said the company is looking for more dynamic candidates who can move between traditional consulting work and an engineering mindset, and who can work alongside AI.
“What we want to be able to do is find people who actually tend to be great consultants at McKinsey, or great technologists, or both, and develop them to be both,” he said.
The same is true for Boston Consulting Group. The company currently has a team of “forward deployment consultants” who build vibecoding and AI tools for client projects.
Sternfels said AI is reshaping more than just the workforce, it's also changing McKinsey's business model.
The firm is moving away from traditional advisory services and a classic fee-for-service approach. Instead, McKinsey is moving to a model in which it works with clients to identify a joint business case and then helps them underwrite the outcomes of that business case.
