The threat of artificial intelligence taking away many jobs previously conducted by humans is real, and reports are now emerging daily that show how the new technology is changing the workforce.
One job in particular that has been cited by various reports as under threat of being replaced by AI is that of an analyst. A new report by The Wall Street Journal revealed that global consulting firm McKinsey is going through an ‘existential transformation’ since artificial intelligence can now do the bulk of the work done by the firm’s highly paid consultants within minutes.
Artificial intelligence is being seen as such a big threat inside the company that it is reportedly a topic of conversation at every meeting of its board, and it has also changed how the company works with clients, how it hires, and even what projects it takes on.
Bob Sternfels, McKinsey’s global managing partner, told the Journal that the company is rapidly deploying thousands of AI agents to assist consultants in building PowerPoint decks, taking notes, summarizing interviews, and research documents.
Kate Smaje, a senior partner in charge of leading McKinsey’s AI efforts, told WSJ, “Do I think that this is existential for our profession? Yes, I do.”
“I think it’s an existential good for us,” Smaje added.
Elon Musk on why AI will not replace consultants:
Going against the popular tide, xAI CEO Elon Musk stated that AI would not replace consultants, given that they are mostly deployed to confirm the decision that the CEO was already thinking of taking.
In response to a post on X (formerly Twitter) citing the WSJ report, Musk wrote, “Some say that the main reason corporate CEOs use consultants is to have an ‘objective third-party’ confirm the decision they were going to make anyway and have someone else to blame if it goes wrong.”
“AI can’t replace that yet,” Musk added.
Musk’s xAI also runs an AI chatbot called Grok and competes with the likes of Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude in the artificial intelligence race. The chatbot received its last model update a few weeks ago and was involved in a number of controversies when it suddenly started showing some love for Adolf Hitler and later tried to toe Musk’s line on political issues. xAI later attributed these issues to deprecated code and issued a fix to resolve the problem.
In the last few days, Musk has been promoting a new Grok feature that can generate videos using text prompts, called ‘Imagine’. The feature is similar to the Sora model by OpenAI and Google’s Veo 3
