{"id":234823,"date":"2026-01-12T21:20:10","date_gmt":"2026-01-12T21:20:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/234823\/"},"modified":"2026-01-12T21:20:10","modified_gmt":"2026-01-12T21:20:10","slug":"mckinsey-now-has-60000-employees-25000-of-them-are-ai-agents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/234823\/","title":{"rendered":"McKinsey Now Has 60,000 Employees: 25,000 of Them Are AI Agents"},"content":{"rendered":"

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?<\/p>\n

It may not be long before McKinsey & Company is asking job candidates such a case question \u2014 but first, the firm is answering it for itself.<\/p>\n

The firm’s CEO, Bob Sternfels<\/a>, said on an episode of Harvard Business Review’s IdeaCast recently that the company is rapidly remaking itself around artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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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.”<\/p>\n

AI agents<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

The rapid agent rollout<\/a> at McKinsey reflects a broader industry push to embed generative AI into several facets of a consultant’s daily work.<\/p>\n

Firms from Boston Consulting Group to PwC are shifting from slide decks and advisory work to multi-year AI-driven transformation projects<\/a>, and adding a slate of new tools to turbocharge their efficiency.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 and can work alongside AI.<\/p>\n

“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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Sternfels said AI is reshaping more than its workforce \u2014 it is also changing McKinsey’s business model.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Here’s a case interview question for you: If a 40,000-person consulting firm added 25,000 AI agents to its…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":234824,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[345,343,344,85,46,125],"class_list":{"0":"post-234823","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-il","12":"tag-israel","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234823","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=234823"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234823\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/234824"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=234823"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=234823"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=234823"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}