McKinsey's AI Now Writes the Deck--Is This the Future of Consulting?

The consulting world might be on the edge of a quiet transformationand McKinsey is already deep in it. Its in-house AI, Lilli, isn't just answering questions anymore. It's writing slides, setting tone, and churning out client-ready reports. Over 75% of McKinsey's employees use the tool regularly, and it's now considered by leadership as part of the team. Headcount has dropped from over 45,000 at the end of 2023 to around 40,000 today. But rather than signal cuts, the firm suggests that AI is freeing people to focus on higher-value work. Do I need armies of analysts making PowerPoints? No, said tech chief Kate Smaje. Is that a bad thing? No, that's a great thing.

Other firms aren't sitting idle. Bain consultants are working with Sage, a custom OpenAI-powered chat system. PWC's Strategy& taps Microsoft Copilot. And at Boston Consulting Group, AI now contributes around 20% of the firm's total revenuea share it expects to climb. Accenture, meanwhile, is going big on physical infrastructure, building 10 global AI hubs, including one in London. What used to be slide decks and spreadsheets is quickly turning into prompt engineering, proprietary LLMs, and tech stacks.

McKinsey's own AI muscle doesn't stop at Lilli. Its QuantumBlack unit is scaling up, with help from partners like Anthropic, Cohere, and Mistral AI. For investors watching the consulting-tech collision, this moment could signal something deeper: a shift in how value is created and delivered at the enterprise level. And as demand for generative AI ramps up, companies like Microsoft MSFTa key OpenAI partnerand other AI infrastructure leaders could be indirect winners.