McKinsey Is Using AI to Create PowerPoints and Take Over Junior Employee Tasks: 'Technology Could Do That' Over 75% of McKinsey employees now use the internal AI tool Lilli, which safely handles confidential information.
By Sherin Shibu Edited by Melissa Malamut
Key Takeaways
- McKinsey developed an internal AI tool called Lilli, which it released in 2023.
- Lilli helps with tasks usually completed by junior employees, like PowerPoint presentations.
- Now the firm reports that over 75% of its 43,000 employees are using Lilli every month.
McKinsey consultants are using the firm's proprietary AI platform to take over tasks that have traditionally been handled by junior employees.
Kate Smaje, McKinsey's global leader of technology and AI, told Bloomberg on Monday that McKinsey employees are increasingly tapping into Lilli, the internal AI platform the firm launched in 2023. While employees are permitted to use ChatGPT internally, Lilli is the only platform that allows them to input confidential client data safely.
Over 75% of McKinsey's 43,000 employees are now using Lilli monthly, Smaje disclosed. Lilli was named after Lillian Dombrowski, the first woman hired by McKinsey in 1945.
Through Lilli, McKinsey consultants can create a PowerPoint slideshow through a prompt and modify the tone of the presentation with a tool called "Tone of Voice" to ensure that the text aligns with the firm's writing style. They can also draft proposals for client projects while maintaining the firm's standards, find internal subject matter experts, and research industry trends.
Lilli has advanced enough to take over tasks typically assigned to junior employees, but Smaje says that doesn't mean McKinsey is going to hire fewer junior analysts.
"Do we need armies of business analysts creating PowerPoints? No, the technology could do that," Smaje told Bloomberg. "It's not necessarily that I'm going to have fewer of them [analysts], but they're going to be doing the things that are more valuable to our clients."
McKinsey told Business Insider that Lilli was trained on the firm's entire intellectual property, encompassing over 100,000 documents and interviews across the firm's nearly 100-year history. McKinsey employees who use Lilli turn to it 17 times per week on average, a McKinsey senior partner told BI.
A case study published on McKinsey's website shows that Lilli answers over half a million prompts every month, saving workers 30% of the time they would have spent on gathering and synthesizing information.
Consulting firms have been tapping into AI for years. Bain consultants have access to Sage, an AI chatbot powered by OpenAI. At Boston Consulting Group, employees use an AI tool called Deckster to fine-tune their PowerPoint presentations.
Meanwhile, at other companies, AI is taking over tasks once completed by human workers. IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said last month that the company replaced hundreds of human resources staff with AI, then used the freed-up resources to hire more programmers and salespeople.
A report from SignalFire, a venture capital firm that tracks over 650 million employees on LinkedIn, found that new graduates accounted for just 7% of new hires in 2024 at big tech companies, down 25% from 2023, as AI takes over entry-level tasks.
