Artificial intelligence is reshaping McKinsey’s workforce, but the firm’s top executive said there are still fundamental human skills that AI models can’t do.
Bob Sternfels, global managing partner at McKinsey, talked about how AI is changing work at the firm during an appearance at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Tuesday.
Sternfels said that last year alone, embracing AI saved McKinsey 1.5 million hours in search and synthesis, work that he says AI models are great for. He also said AI agents, of which McKinsey has 25,000, excel at generating charts and that they’ve made 2.5 million of them in the past six months.
With agents taking over some of that work, he said consultants are now “moving up the stack” and tackling “more complicated problems.”
Given those changes, Sternfels said McKinsey looked at which skills new graduates will need in an AI-infused world from the perspective of large employers. He identified three: the ability to aspire, judgment, and true creativity.
The ability to aspire
“What can the models not do? Aspire. Set the right aspiration,” he said. “Do you go to low Earth orbit? Do you go to the moon? Do you go to Mars? That’s a uniquely human capability.”
Sternfels said you should look to build skills around aspiring and getting others to believe in those aspirations.
Judgement
“There’s no right and wrong in these models, and so how do you set the right parameters?” he said, adding humans can build the skills to set the architecture based on factors like firm values and societal norms.
True creativity
“The models are inference models — the next most likely step,” Sternfels said.
Humans, on the other hand, have an edge when it comes to “orthogonal” work, or the ability to think outside existing patterns and land on an entirely new approach.
Changes to how companies look for talent
Sternfels said AI adoption is also changing how companies look for talent, adding that where someone went to school should matter a lot less.
For someone with a tech background, he said, instead of looking at where they graduated from, prospective employers should look at their GitHub, a site engineers use to showcase their work.
“Let’s actually get to the content,” he said, “and could that actually start meaning that a wider set of people can enter the workforce with different pathways?”
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