McKinsey CEO Bob Sternfels said last month that his company had added 25,000 AI agents in less than two years.
His rivals were unimpressed.
“I don’t think the number of agents directly translates into value,” Steve Newman, EY’s global head of engineering, told Business Insider. “In fact, some of the best value we have is returned by a handful of agents doing the heavy lifting.”
Neumann said EY is focusing more on measuring efficiency. He said EY tracks agent value through key performance indicators of productivity, quality and cost.
“We graph them monthly, quarterly. That’s my perspective on the effectiveness of AI,” he said.
Dan Priest, PwC’s chief AI officer, also recently told Business Insider that he is unfazed by McKinsey’s army of AI agents.
“I think that’s probably the wrong move,” he said. The value of AI deployment is measured by the quality of agents, not the quantity, he said.
Sternfels spoke for the first time at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January about how the company has onboarded tens of thousands of agents. He mentioned this again on an episode of Harvard Business Review’s IdeaCast. A McKinsey spokesperson later confirmed to Business Insider that the numbers were accurate.
Sternfels said the company plans to add more. Within the next year and a half, all 40,000 employees will be “served by at least one agent,” he said.
AI is rapidly reshaping the consulting industry in recent years. McKinsey, EY, PwC, and other consulting firms are competing to implement AI within their companies and establish themselves as the go-to companies for other companies seeking advice on how to implement AI.
EY said on its October earnings call that it invests more than $1 billion annually in developing AI-first platforms and products, including building 1,000 AI agents and deploying more than 100 internal AI applications.
