McKinsey consultants are using AI to end their dependence on PowerPoint
Louis-Charles Généreux, a McKinsey consultant, built an AI-assisted website to manage his consulting project and effectively replace PowerPoint.
Louis-Charles Généreux, a McKinsey consultant, built an AI-assisted website to manage his consulting project and effectively replace PowerPoint. This
Read Full Story at Business Insider Mkt →Why This Matters
The shift away from PowerPoint among elite consultants signals a broader reckoning with the limitations of traditional presentation tools in an era of rapid technological advancement. By leveraging AI to automate and streamline project documentation, McKinsey’s experiment challenges the very foundation of how corporate knowledge is curated and communicated—raising questions about the future of expertise in consulting itself.
Background Context
PowerPoint has long been the default medium for structuring and conveying complex ideas in business, government, and academia, but its linear, slide-based format often obscures nuance and stifles dynamic collaboration. Consulting firms, which thrive on synthesizing vast amounts of data into actionable insights, have historically relied on it despite its inefficiencies—partly because no alternative offered the same blend of control and presentation polish.
What Happens Next
If McKinsey’s AI-assisted platform gains traction internally and externally, it could trigger a domino effect across the consulting industry, forcing competitors to either adopt similar tools or risk falling behind in efficiency and innovation. The bigger unknown is whether this signals a move toward AI-driven knowledge management systems or merely a boutique experiment—one that other firms may cautiously emulate rather than fully embrace.
Bigger Picture
This development reflects a growing trend of AI tools being used to automate rote cognitive labor, from drafting memos to generating insights, which could redefine the role of consultants from mere synthesizers of information to curators of machine-generated knowledge. It also underscores the tension between tradition and disruption in professional services, where entrenched workflows often resist change—until they don’t.
