McKinsey CEO Bob Sternfels said last month that the firm added 25,000 AI agents to its staff in less than two years.
His rivals were unimpressed.
“I don’t think the number of agents translates directly to value,” EY’s global engineering chief, Steve Newman, told Business Insider. “In fact, some of the best value that we have is returned by just a handful of agents that are doing the heavy lifting.”
Newman said EY is more focused on measuring efficiency. He said EY tracks agent value through key performance indicators for productivity, quality, and cost.
“We chart those month to month, quarter to quarter, and that’s what my lens is as to the effectiveness of AI,” he said.
PwC’s chief AI officer, Dan Priest, also recently told Business Insider that he’s unmoved by McKinsey’s army of AI agents.
“I think that’s probably the wrong measure,” he said. The value of AI deployment is better measured by the quality — not the quantity — of agents, he said.
Sternfels first talked about his firm’s onboarding of tens of thousands of agents in January at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. He mentioned it again on an episode of Harvard Business Review’s IdeaCast. A McKinsey spokesperson later confirmed to Business Insider that the number was accurate.
Sternfels said the firm plans to add more, too. In the next year and a half, every one of its 40,000 human employees will be “enabled by at least one or more agents,” he said.
AI has rapidly reshaped the consulting industry in recent years. McKinsey, EY, PwC, and other consulting firms are all racing to both adopt AI internally and position themselves as the go-to for other companies seeking advice on how to do the same.
EY said during an October earnings call that it invests more than $1 billion each year to develop AI-first platforms and products, including building 1,000 AI agents and deploying more than 100 internal AI applications.
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