McKinsey consultants are using AI to end their dependence on PowerPoint

• Use of PowerPoint has dropped sharply at McKinsey in the AI age, a top executive told Business Insider.
• One employee told us how he built an AI-assisted website to manage a consulting project.
• The site acts as a central project hub, replacing the need for a multi-slide PowerPoint.

What AI is now doing, Smaje continued, is shining a light on where and how value is really created for clients, and speeding up the whole process.

At McKinsey, AI has accelerated the early problem-solving cycle, turning what used to be a team’s “week one answer” — the first hypothesis after a week of research and analysis — into an “hour one answer.”

That frees up consultants to spend more time testing deeper parts of the issue tree rather than waiting days to get oriented, Smaje said.

In practice, Généreux said his team was using the added time by holding “dojo sessions or hackathons” a few times a week to explore ideas that back in the day would have been remote hypotheses.

“We now have the time to do that and the tools to very quickly determine whether or not that’s worth exploring,” he said.