McKinsey Consultants Are Letting New Technology Take Over an Essential Part of Their Work
McKinsey staff are known for their dependence on PowerPoint — but times are changing.
Key Takeaways
- McKinsey has sharply reduced the time spent manually building slide decks as consultants increasingly rely on internal generative AI tools to draft presentations and proposals.
- Around three-quarters of employees now use the firm’s proprietary platform, Lilli.
- Lilli handles search, synthesis and first-draft slide creation from simple text prompts.
A core part of the consulting job at McKinsey is creating PowerPoint presentations — but new technology is changing the game.
Kate Smaje, McKinsey’s global leader for technology and AI, recently told Business Insider that use of PowerPoint at the firm has dropped sharply in the past few months. Instead of manually building slide decks, many teams now use AI to generate full presentations from text prompts. They use internal AI tools to assemble outlines and charts in minutes.
The center of this shift is Lilli, McKinsey’s proprietary generative AI platform that sits on top of the firm’s knowledge base. Since its rollout in July 2023, three-quarters of employees have adopted Lilli, feeding the AI more than 500,000 prompts every month, McKinsey reported.
The firm designed Lilli to pull from McKinsey’s internal documents, past client work and proprietary research while keeping confidential data secret. Consultants can feed in a problem statement or a short brief and ask the system to generate draft slides, synthesize findings or standardize tone across a proposal.
How Lilli has impacted McKinsey
Smaje described Lilli as a virtual team member for every task. She said that Lilli’s capabilities have developed enough to take over “at least some of the tasks typically performed by junior employees,” including drafting slide decks and proposal documents.
“Do we need armies of business analysts creating PowerPoints? No, the technology could do that,” Smaje told Bloomberg last year. She added that this was “a great thing” because it freed early-career consultants to work on tasks that clients valued more.
McKinsey CEO Bob Sternfels said in a LinkedIn post last year that “it’s not a competition — it’s a collaboration.”
“Yes, there are Lilli agents that can make slides and charts. But more than that, there are others capable of deep research, data synthesis and other high-level tasks — real hallmarks of our profession,” Sternfels wrote. “Even so, we don’t see tech as replacing consultants… far from it. We see it augmenting us.”
Saving over a million hours of work
McKinsey has said that Lilli and its related tools are saving up to 30% of the time consultants once spent searching and synthesizing information.
Those gains add up. Earlier this year, Sternfels disclosed that McKinsey’s AI agents have already saved 1.5 million hours of human work in a single year, largely by automating research, analysis and presentation prep.
For McKinsey, letting AI take over the slide work helps productivity while also signaling that the firm is forward-thinking.
At the same time, Sternfels is adamant that the value of consulting lies in human judgment, not in the mechanics of building decks.
“We’re also doubling down on hiring for what AI can’t do — aspiration, human judgment, creativity,” he wrote in a LinkedIn post earlier this year. “Only humans can do the kind of orthogonal thinking that leads to game-changing outcomes.”
A spokesperson told Bloomberg last year that the firm employed about 40,000 workers globally, down from more than 45,000 at the end of 2023.
Key Takeaways
- McKinsey has sharply reduced the time spent manually building slide decks as consultants increasingly rely on internal generative AI tools to draft presentations and proposals.
- Around three-quarters of employees now use the firm’s proprietary platform, Lilli.
- Lilli handles search, synthesis and first-draft slide creation from simple text prompts.
A core part of the consulting job at McKinsey is creating PowerPoint presentations — but new technology is changing the game.
Kate Smaje, McKinsey’s global leader for technology and AI, recently told Business Insider that use of PowerPoint at the firm has dropped sharply in the past few months. Instead of manually building slide decks, many teams now use AI to generate full presentations from text prompts. They use internal AI tools to assemble outlines and charts in minutes.
The center of this shift is Lilli, McKinsey’s proprietary generative AI platform that sits on top of the firm’s knowledge base. Since its rollout in July 2023, three-quarters of employees have adopted Lilli, feeding the AI more than 500,000 prompts every month, McKinsey reported.
