Boston Consulting Group
- Boston Consulting Group is integrating AI into metrics for performance evaluation.
- BCG says AI adoption has reached 90%, with 50% of employees using it daily.
- BCG leads in custom GPT development, enhancing performance reviews, and client services.
There is no room at Boston Consulting Group for AI skeptics.
About a year ago, the firm began building AI expectations into the benchmarks that shape how consultants are assessed, Alicia Pittman, the global people team chair at BCG, told Business Insider.
“There’s no box on our forms that says, ‘Are you using AI?’ It is an expectation,” she said, but the technology is now central to the core competencies, like problem solving and insight, that drive evaluations and promotions.
“If you’re not, you won’t do well on the competencies—you’ll fall behind your peers on problem solving and insight,” she said.
AI hasn’t changed the type of work BCG expects from employees, Pittman said, but it has raised the bar on quality and efficiency.
“For example, in problem solving, a consultant might use AI to surface insights — but performance is assessed on the judgment they apply to interpret those insights, structure the problem, and deliver solutions that matter for clients,” she said.
Perhaps the most impactful application of AI is in performance management itself. Pittman said one of the firm’s best AI tools helps employees write performance reviews — cutting writing time by 40% while improving quality metrics by 20%.
BCG’s employees are taking up AI faster than expected
Now, almost 90% of the firm’s 33,000 employees use AI, and about half are what BCG calls “habitual users,” or those who use the technology daily. “That’s something we measure because it leads to stickiness and sophistication of use,” Pittman said. The firm had aimed for 50% adoption by year’s end but hit that milestone in May, months ahead of schedule.
BCG isn’t unique in urging employees to adopt AI. Across the industry, consulting firms are retooling their workforces. Accenture, for example, has said it is “exiting” employees it can’t reskill, even as its CEO, Julie Sweet, projects overall head count will grow in the next fiscal year. At McKinsey, over 70% of the firm’s 45,000 employees now use use its chatbot Lilli, McKinsey senior partner Delphine Zurkiya told Business Insider in March.
Progress at BCG has largely been thanks to its AI training program.
As of April, the firm had developed eight or nine internal tools. Deckster, a slideshow editor trained on 800 to 900 templates, helps consultants build and grade presentations; about 40% of associates use it weekly, Scott Wilder, partner and managing director at BCG, previously told Business Insider.
GENE, a GPT-4o-powered chatbot from ElevenLabs, a startup that develops text-to-voice AI technology, features a deliberately robotic voice and is used for brainstorming, podcasts, and live demos.
The firm provides training for employees on how to use its AI tools. It has a dedicated generative AI learning and development team staffed by rotational consultants who teach and codify best practices. It also has a network of 1,200 people in local offices who function like “ground troops,” Wilder said. They provide hands-on training, gather feedback, and push forward on adoption.
Wilder told Business Insider the firm estimates employees reinvest about 70% of the time they save into “higher-value activities” including analysis and communicating insights clearly.
The firm is also tracking a group of about 1,500 “advanced users” — employees at the edge of experimentation with AI. Roughly two-thirds are associates and consultants, BCG’s entry-level ranks, Pittman said.
One of their biggest contributions has been creating custom GPTs, or no-code versions of ChatGPT tailored to specific tasks.
Consultants have developed GPTs to review slide decks, check clarity, anticipate client questions, and enforce BCG formatting guidelines. Many are tested internally before being shared with clients.
BCG is now the highest number of custom GPTs of any OpenAI customer, Pittman said, with five times more employees building them than a year ago.
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