Inside the AI boom that's transforming how consultants work at McKinsey, BCG, and Deloitte

It wasn't agelong agone that young consultants astatine McKinsey & Company would pore implicit reports to guarantee they aligned with the firm's penning style.

Now, an AI agent called "Tone of Voice" does that.

At Boston Consulting Group, consultants present usage a instrumentality called Deckster to trim the clip they walk polishing PowerPoint slides. At Ernst & Young, alternatively of contacting payroll, consultants tin inquire a chatbot to explicate their wage slips.

Consulting firms are among the aboriginal leaders of the generative AI craze. They're helping different companies bid employees, make caller tools, and modulate the technology.

They are besides investigating generative AI internally, and successful conscionable the past 2 years, they've unveiled a caller suite of chatbots, agents, and applications that person rapidly and softly changed however consultants bash their work.

At McKinsey, consultants are utilizing an in-house generative AI chatbot called Lilli. It synthesizes the firm's full assemblage of intelligence property, which spans 100 years and implicit 100,000 documents and interviews, the steadfast told BI.

Users participate their requests into Lilli, which aggregates the cardinal points, identifies 5 to 7 applicable interior contented pieces, and points users to due experts wrong the firm. Users tin opt to person queries answered by the firm's interior cognition repository oregon outer sources.

Lilli's usage astatine the steadfast has exploded since it was archetypal rolled retired successful 2023. Over 70% of the firm's 45,000 employees present usage the tool. Those who usage it crook to it astir 17 times a week, McKinsey elder spouse Delphine Zurkiya told BI.

When McKinsey archetypal launched Lilli, employees experienced what the steadfast calls "prompt anxiety," oregon uncertainty implicit what to inquire the bot. But it recovered that conscionable 1 hr of grooming improved worker engagement. Zurkiya said the instrumentality has besides evolved since its launch. It wasn't initially designed to parse PowerPoints, wherever astir of the firm's cognition exists.

Now, McKinsey consultants told BI they usage it for research, summarizing documents, analyzing data, and brainstorming. In a lawsuit survey published connected its website, the steadfast reported that workers saved 30% of their clip utilizing Lilli.

Zurkiya, who describes herself arsenic "one of the dense users of Lilli," said she often uses it with teams to place the close attack to solving lawsuit problems. "We astir person AI successful the country with america due to the fact that we are often saying, oh, what does Lilli think," she said.