McKinsey’s top executive shared some hard numbers on how AI is reshaping the consulting giant’s workforce.
Bob Sternfels, McKinsey’s global managing partner, appeared at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Tuesday for a live taping of the “All-In” podcast with co-host Jason Calacanis and Hemant Taneja, CEO of General Catalyst.
Sternfels said AI has fundamentally changed how McKinsey staffs its business, allowing it to add and cut jobs in equal measure while still achieving overall growth.
Referring to it as the “25 squared” approach, Sternfels said McKinsey is growing its client-facing roles — what you typically picture when you think of a McKinsey consultant — by 25%. At the same time, he said non-client-facing roles, which make up the other half of its workforce, have shrunk by about 25% while output from that side has grown 10%.
“Our model has always been synonymous that growth only occurs with total head count growth. Now it’s actually splitting. We can grow in this part, the client-facing side, and we can shrink in this part and have aggregate growth in total,” he said. “That’s a new paradigm and a new dynamic.”
Sternfels said the firm has seen massive productivity gains as it’s embraced AI, saving 1.5 million hours in search and synthesis work last year alone. Instead of doing the work that’s typically done by more junior employees, he said McKinsey consultants are “moving up the stack” and tackling more complicated problems.
McKinsey employees also have a brand new set of coworkers that are increasingly becoming an essential part of the company: AI agents, which can act independently like digital employees. Sternfels said that as of last week, the company had 40,000 human employees and 25,000 personalized agents. Sternfels said AI agents are able to handle entire job functions on their own.
He expects McKinsey to have about the same number of AI agents as human employees by the end of the year.
For young professionals coming into the workforce, Sternfels said they should think about honing skills that AI can’t do, setting the right aspirations, human judgment, and true creativity.
Business Insider has previously reported on how AI is disrupting consulting and changing the ways firms like McKinsey make money, including by shifting to an outcome-based pricing model.
The workforce changes at McKinsey also reflect a broader challenge facing large, established companies as AI disrupts how we work.
“This is about how do you transform incumbent entities into something different,” he said at CES, adding that for large existing enterprises “you have a choice — transform or die.”
He added that companies are “moving at literally warp speed now.”
“I haven’t met a CEO yet that isn’t talking about ‘how do I get my organization moving faster,'” he’s said. “It’s quite frankly less about strategy, it’s more about organizational speed.”
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