Here’s a case interview question for you: If a 40,000-person consulting firm added 25,000 AI agents to its workforce in under two years, how would that change its competitive advantage?
It may not be long before McKinsey & Company is asking job candidates such a case question — but first, the firm is answering it for itself.
The firm’s CEO, Bob Sternfels, said on an episode of Harvard Business Review’s IdeaCast recently that the company is rapidly remaking itself around artificial intelligence.
He said that, according to his latest tally, the firm now has a workforce of 60,000, which he said is made up of 40,000 humans and 20,000 agents.
Speaking at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week, he said the number of AI agents McKinsey uses is actually closer to 25,000. A McKinsey spokesperson confirmed to Business Insider that this figure is the most accurate.
Sternfels said on the podcast that just a year and a half ago, the company only used a few thousand agents and hopes that in the next year and a half, every employee will be “enabled by at least one or more agents.”
AI agents are commonly defined as virtual assistants that can complete tasks autonomously. They break down problems, outline plans, and take action without being prompted by a user.
The rapid agent rollout at McKinsey reflects a broader industry push to embed generative AI into several facets of a consultant’s daily work.
Firms from Boston Consulting Group to PwC are shifting from slide decks and advisory work to multi-year AI-driven transformation projects, and adding a slate of new tools to turbocharge their efficiency.
QuantumBlack, with its 1,700-person team, drives all of McKinsey’s AI initiatives, which now account for 40% of the firm’s work, Alex Singla, a senior partner at McKinsey who co-leads QuantumBlack, told Business Insider.
As part of that effort, Singla said the firm is seeking a more dynamic set of candidates who can move between traditional consulting work and an engineering mindset — and can work alongside AI.
“What we want to be able to do is find those people that actually have a propensity to either be this great McKinsey consultant, and/or a great technologist, and then groom them to be both,” he said.
The same is true at Boston Consulting Group, which now has a team of “forward-deployed consultants” who are vibe-coding and building AI tools for client projects.
Sternfels said AI is reshaping more than its workforce — it is also changing McKinsey’s business model.
The firm is transitioning from its traditional advisory work and classic fee-for-service approach. Instead, McKinsey is moving toward a model where it works with clients to identify joint business cases and then helps them underwrite the outcomes of that business case.
