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CEO Bob Sternfels says AI agents now work alongside more than 40,000 human employees across McKinsey’s consulting operations.
McKinsey & Company says artificial intelligence has become a big part of its global workforce, joining more than 40,000 human employees with 25,000 AI agents. The announcement came from chief executive Bob Sternfels himself and was another radical way the management consulting firm does business.
Speaking at CES in Las Vegas and in an episode of the Harvard Business Review IdeaCast, Sternfels said that McKinsey's total workforce now tops 60,000, a growing proportion of which is AI agents embedded across day-to-day operations. The firm will make sure that every human employee is backed up by at least one AI agent shortly to enhance productivity and efficiency.
According to Sternfels, the use of AI agents has grown rapidly at McKinsey over the past two years, from a few thousand to almost 25,000 today. These are not simple chatbots but advanced systems able to break down complex problems, conduct research, analyze data, create documents, and support client deliverables.
This move can also be attributed to what Sternfels termed “25-squared” in McKinsey’s model. In this approach, the company aims at boosting the number of its client-confrontational employees by 25 percent and shrinking the rest by the same percentage. Use of AI in the company has reportedly saved 1.5 million hours of work in the last year, including the generation of millions of charts and the execution of simple analytics.
Although AI technology has brought changes to the structure of the workforce, Sternfels highlighted the importance of human consultants in areas such as judgment, creativity, and decision-making. The industry is witnessing changes, as firms are increasingly adopting AI technology to transform the way the consulting industry operates.
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