• Consulting firms are rapidly adopting AI tools to enhance efficiency and innovation.
• Firms say that workers were ambivalent about AI at first.
• Now, they say AI has helped workers save time, which they reinvest in more advanced work.

It wasn't long ago that consultants at McKinsey & Company would pore over reports to ensure they aligned with the firm's writing style.

Now, an AI agent called "Tone of Voice" does that.

At Boston Consulting Group, consultants now use a tool called Deckster to reduce the time they spend polishing PowerPoint slides. At Ernst & Young, instead of contacting payroll, consultants can ask a chatbot to explain their pay slips.

Consulting firms are among the early leaders of the generative AI craze. They're helping other companies train employees, develop new tools, and regulate the technology.

They are also testing generative AI internally, and in just the past two years, they've unveiled a new suite of chatbots, agents, and applications that have quickly and quietly changed how consultants do their work.

McKinsey has embraced GenAI's conversational approach

At McKinsey, consultants are using an in-house generative AI chatbot called Lilli. It synthesizes the firm's entire body of intellectual property, which spans 100 years and over 100,000 documents and interviews, the firm told BI.

Users enter their requests into Lilli, which aggregates the key points, identifies five to seven relevant internal content pieces, and points users to appropriate experts within the firm. Users can opt to have queries answered by the firm's internal knowledge repository or external sources.

Lilli's usage at the firm has exploded since it was first rolled out in 2023. Over 70% of the firm's 45,000 employees now use the tool. Those who use it turn to it about 17 times a week, McKinsey senior partner Delphine Zurkiya told BI.

When McKinsey first launched Lilli, employees experienced what the firm calls "prompt anxiety," or uncertainty over what to ask the bot. But it found that just one hour of training improved employee engagement. Zurkiya said the tool has also evolved since its launch. It wasn't initially designed to parse PowerPoints, where most of the firm's knowledge exists.

Now, McKinsey consultants told BI they use it for research, summarizing documents, analyzing data, and brainstorming. In a case study published on its website, the firm reported that workers saved 30% of their time using Lilli.

Zurkiya, who describes herself as "one of the heavy users of Lilli," said she often uses it with teams to identify the right approach to solving client problems. "We almost have AI in the room with us because we are often saying, oh, what does Lilli think," she said.

Partners at McKinsey told BI that the firm has been developing AI products for years. In 2015, it acquired a data analytics and design company, QuantumBlack, which now serves as McKinsey's AI consulting arm. It employs 7,000 tech experts across 50 countries.

"About 40% of the work we do is analytics-related, AI-related, and a lot of it is moving to Gen AI," senior partner Ben Ellencweig told BI last year. McKinsey builds generative AI solutions for clients through an "ecosystem" of alliances with 19 AI companies, including Microsoft, Google, Anthropic, and Nvidia, and has completed over 400 genAI projects for clients.

But the popularity of ChatGPT crystallized the value of a conversational tool, Zurkiya said. "There wasn't a major shift in our strategy in the sense that we had already been developing a lot of tools internally. It's just these tools now have become, we'll say faster, in delivering value thanks to that natural user interface," she said.

McKinsey consultants do not have access to ChatGPT.

Lilli is just one of several AI tools changing work within the firm. Zurkiya said that AI technology is being deployed at three levels. On an individual level, a platform lets consultants build their own AI agents — technology that, among other things, can solve problems and execute tasks autonomously. Then, there are more domain-specific tools. Agents in the Life Sciences practice, where Zurkiya works, can help consultants get up to speed on specific companies in the sector. There are also firm-wide tools, like new ones for booking meetings and travel.

The firm also applies the lessons from building Lilli to new client projects, developing similar tools that fit their needs.

Despite the hype around genAI tools, consultants don't seem worried that their jobs could be threatened as a result. Commentators on the anonymous professional networking app Fishbowl who work at McKinsey described its tools as "functional enough" and best for "very low stakes issues."

BCG wants AI to 'increase the joy' in work

Over the last two years, BCG has pushed to train its employees in AI.

In 2023, the firm unveiled ChatGPT Enterprise to all its employees under the stipulation that all data would remain under its control. Since then, the firm's 33,000 employees have built over 18,000 custom GPTs — tailored versions of ChatGPT — for internal uses from summarizing documents to generating automatic email responses to answering HR-specific questions.

BCG has also developed eight or nine internal generative AI tools, Scott Wilder, partner and managing director, told BI.

One tool it has heavily invested in is Deckster, a slideshow editor, Wilder said. It's trained on 800 to 900 slide templates and helps consultants quickly create presentations. Wilder said one of Deckster's most popular features is a "review this" button, which helps junior consultants by grading slides based on best practices used by midlevel managers and leaders. About 40% of associates use Deckster weekly, Wilder said.

The tool has become so popular that some of its consultants are fretting about job security. "BCG folks who've tried Deckster: how worried should we be about our jobs? Is it already creating groundbreaking productivity that more junior folks won't be needed as much?" one consultant wrote on Fishbowl last year.

One of the more experimental tools BCG has unveiled is GENE, a conversational chatbot. The bot is built on top of GPT-4o by ElevenLabs and sports an intentionally robotic voice.

"It's a deliberate choice, a subtle reminder that I'm an AI, not a human. Keeps expectations in check," GENE said about its voice during a BCG podcast in December 2023. "Plus it adds a bit of retro charm, doesn't it?"

GENE also explained that its knowledge base is "built from an extensive collection of BCG's best thinking on genAI, shaped by conversations with industry experts, articles, and research studies."

The bot is designed to be a "conversation partner," the firm said. Consultants have employed it for brainstorming, hosting podcasts, live demonstrations, and are even considering using it to interview partners to create content for the firm. Teams can change the bot's "temperature" to control the tone of its responses.

BCG also has an internal platform for building AI agents in beta testing.

Amid gloomy narratives of layoffs and robots coming for jobs, Wilder said the firm's thesis on AI is optimistic. "We will say our goal is to take out the toil and increase the joy," he said. The firm estimates that employees reinvest about 70% of the time they save into "higher value activities," he added.

But those time savings also mean the expectations on consultants are in flux. BCG hasn't changed how it evaluates performance now that it relies so much on genAI tools. However, a spokesperson for the firm told BI it is "thoughtfully considering the role they play as these technologies become more central to how we work."

Deloitte, KPMG, and PwC see promise in AI agents

At Deloitte, generative AI appears to be more tightly regulated. For one, ChatGPT is blocked from the firm's internal system, three consultants told BI.

"I think probably what they really are trying to avoid here is analysts or just forgetful people putting something like client data into a generative AI tool," Andrew Sutton, a senior advisory consultant at the firm, told BI. Sutton, who builds internal AI tools for other consultants at the firm, said they're required to develop them in secure environments to prevent data leaks.

"If we are using a tool that comes from something like OpenAI, we have special communications and contracts with them," he said. "The amount of bureaucracy, all that stuff, that we have to go through is insane."

The firm has its own ChatGPT alternative called Sidekick, which comes with a disclaimer that employees are only allowed to use it for non-client work. Deloitte consultants told BI they use it for summarizing documents, brainstorming, editing emails, and coding.

Deloitte has invested billions into artificial intelligence, however. In March, it unveiled Zora AI, a new fleet of AI agents. The firm says they're trained in specific subjects — like finance or marketing — and designed to think like humans. Last year, it expanded its digital delivery platform, Ascend, with generative AI capabilities.

Publicly, the firm's leadership has also rallied around the technology. At Nvidia's GTC Conference in March, Deloitte principal Jillian Wanner, who leads AI staff development at the firm, acknowledged that the consulting industry is being "disrupted" amid AI transformations. Jim Rowan, head of AI at Deloitte, previously told BI that senior managers should use AI to demonstrate its effectiveness and give employees time to explore the technology.

In a recent statement to BI, Rowan said, "We believe AI is transforming all industries, including our own, ushering in new business models and ways of working, and helping to uncover new sources of business growth and innovation."

KPMG is taking two-pronged approach to AI adoption, according to its head of ecosystems, Todd Lohr. "I'm a big fan of top down and bottoms up," Lohr told BI. "It's really hard to know what hundreds of thousands of people in an organization are doing day to day. But by giving them the technology and letting them use it, they're coming up with even better and more creative ways than any top down methodology."

He said people were a bit confused about how to use genAI when the firm started rolling out the technology two years ago.

"I call it swivel chair processing. It's really hard for people who have been doing tasks for — in some cases — decades to stop what they're doing," Lohr said. Since then, the firm has harvested data on how employees are prompting AI. It's used that information to build new tools, for itself and clients, through retrieval augmented generation — a technique to enhance the specificity and accuracy of large language models — and open data sources, Lohr said.

As consulting firms develop more sophisticating tooling, like platforms for agents, they've realized they need hubs to centralize them. KPMG signed an agreement with Google Cloud this month to purchase licenses for Agentspace — a new platform that integrates AI agents with a company's data — for its US workforce.

Deloitte recently unveiled Agent2Agent, a new platform to improve interoperability between agents. It's the firm's largest collaboration with Google Cloud and ServiceNow.

PwC unveiled a similar platform, called agent OS, last month. It helps centralize clients' agents, and the more than 250 internal ones it has built in the past 18 months. The idea is to convert isolated agents from "ships passing in the night" to "an armada that's working together," Matt Wood, PwC's global and US commercial technology and innovation officer, told BI.

After a post-pandemic dry spell in which many consulting firms struggled with layoffs, lost contracts, and cost-cutting initiatives, generative AI is something of a light at the end of the tunnel — even with the latest scrutiny from Washington.

"My bet is that as more agents become available, organizations will see not just efficiency, but growth," Wood said. "And that growth will allow them to double down on what is working and will result in larger organizations, not smaller organizations."

YYou've just been added to a meeting. It's late afternoon, late in the week, and someone is presenting a deck. Geez, here we go. The presenter reads words that you can also read from a bulleted list on a lightly decorated page projected before you. Next slide. Because you've seen hundreds of PowerPoint presentations since your sixth-grade science-fair days, you instinctively know this one's going to take the full hour. Eyes glaze over, yawns are stifled. Next slide. The presenter attempts to play an embedded video, but the audio doesn't work. "You get the idea" though. Next slide.

Nearly four decades after the launch of PowerPoint, the slide deck remains one of the most dominant forces shaping how we think — and don't think — about our work. From startup pitches to Pentagon procurement timetables, from quarterly board meetings to annual harassment trainings, billions of presentations are given each year in a single rigid, information-squishing format, on PowerPoint or its imitators Keynote, Google Slides, or now Figma Slides. Humanity continues to cram compelling and vital information into single-idea slides, strip these ideas of context, and read them aloud among a flurry of GIFs, charts, and animated wipes and swipes. Rarely does the deck — which by design dictates a one-sided style of conversation — elicit robust questions from or conversation with the audience. We are constantly pitching our bosses, their bosses, investors, and each other via a one-size rhetorical tool that doesn't really fit all.

But some are finally thinking outside the deck. Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Sundar Pichai, and military top brass have been bad-mouthing and even banning slide presentations from meetings, instead favoring memos or even old-fashioned, visual-aid-free, raw-dogged discussion. Rippling, which makes HR and payroll software, has done the impossible: complete a funding round (a $45 million Series A) without a deck. Several startups, including one from Edward Norton — yes, the actor — have launched alternatives to the deck. It appears that even three Academy Award nominations cannot spare one's life from the stultifying ubiquity of decks, and Norton and his two cofounders at Zeck are on a mission to vanquish it.

Is the deck in jeopardy? Are we at last approaching a day when "this meeting could have been an email" lives alongside "this meeting could have gone without a deck"? Next slide.

For most of the 20th century, workplace meetings were typically small and informal discussions with a few colleagues. By the 1980s, the computer revolution was generating loads more information for every business to digest and act on. This meant more and bigger meetings across departments, which meant more presentations, which usually meant slide projectors. But those presentations were clunky, finicky, and laborious to make.

Then, in the mid-'80s, an ailing software startup called Forethought developed a first-of-its-kind graphics program in which computer users could string together a series of slides. Originally called Presenter, it was released in April 1987, as PowerPoint. Microsoft immediately saw its world-changing potential, buying Forethought just four months later for $14 million. For one thousandth of the nearly $14 billion the company has invested in OpenAI, Microsoft acquired a program that remains arguably more consequential to how businesses operate. By 1993, Microsoft was raking in $100 million from PowerPoint sales a year; by 2003, $1 billion. Microsoft estimated that 30 million PowerPoint presentations were being made every day.

Decks have no shortage of zealots, including my former boss. When I worked at BarkBox, Nick Cogan, a vice president of creative, always had us making decks — not just for big retail pitches but for every little task. Product planning, style guide, whatever it was, we'd make a deck. I maybe want him to apologize for all the deck wrangling, but he laughs and doesn't give an inch defending them, which, as a former animator, he loves for their storytelling capabilities. "'Look at this, not us' can be essential when presenting," he says. He describes the perfect presentation as both a "useful crutch" and a "little kids' storybook," where he can walk the great and mighty decision-makers through storytime instead of business time.

Christina Farr, a healthtech director and investor who wrote a book about storytelling in business, agrees, arguing that the deck actually draws its power from its ubiquity. Because people are used to both writing and receiving decks, "people know what the story should sound like," and the expected rhythms and beats of a PowerPoint presentation "are already baked in." But it's not just an emotional expectation, she says — it's also a formal one: "If you're raising money, in 2024, you have to have a deck. Everybody expects you to do it."

True, but there's also been no shortage of deck denigrators. In 2003, the media theorist Edward Tufte published "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint," which remains one of the most deliciously damning indictments of a software program ever written. Over several thousand words, Tufte flambés PowerPoint, and "slideware" in general, for "making us stupid, degrading the quality and credibility of our communication, turning us into bores, wasting our colleagues' time." Though PowerPoint was developed and even celebrated as a "cure for the presentation jitters," Tufte maligns it as overly oriented toward the presenter, leaving little room for the listener to chime in or even actively listen. Tufte even goes so far as to blame PowerPoint's "poverty of content" and its "foreshortening of evidence and thought" for the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster.

The jeremiad had many admirers, including Jeff Bezos. Inspired by Tufte, the Amazon CEO in June 2004 banned PowerPoint from executive meetings. The book "Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon" describes Bezos as finding slide decks "frustrating, inefficient, error-prone," with a stiff format that "made it difficult to evaluate actual progress." In its place the company developed what's become known as the Amazon Six-Pager: a detailed memo outlining — in narrative prose, not bullet points — the conversations and business problems that have surfaced the need for a meeting. In a deck, information takes a back seat to form and format; the memo, in contrast, forces the presenter to embody a Joan Didion axiom: "I don't know what I think until I write it down." Attendees read the six-pager before the meeting, so everyone can enter the meeting informed and be held accountable for the decisions made out of the discussion.

"I hate the way people use slide presentations instead of thinking," Steve Jobs once opined, adding that "people who know what they're talking about don't need PowerPoint." Even Steve Ballmer, who sits atop literal millions and owns the Los Angeles Clippers in part because of PowerPoint money, maligned decks while he was CEO of Microsoft. "I don't think it's efficient," he said in 2011, adding, "Most meetings nowadays, you send me the materials and I read them in advance. And I can come in and say: 'I've got the following four questions. Please don't present the deck.'" Over the years, many members of the US military have cast aspersions toward what they call "death by PowerPoint."

"The incentive structures for a slide deck are all bad," says Aviv Gilboa, the president of Skylight, a consumer tech company known for its digital picture frames and calendars. To Gilboa, who worked at Amazon for four years, decks aren't just boring, they're antithetical to many ways we think and work. The format of a single slide is inherently low-information: When you're pitching, you're persuading, and so you can fit only one idea per slide, often forcing you to leave some good ideas behind.

Gilboa says decks also help presenters feel good without forcing them to engage with their decisions. Decks help reinforce this perception of assurance, what Gilboa calls "the smoke and mirrors of how we got to this choice." As I sat at BarkBox making decks every which way for every little business problem, I felt like a purveyor of both smoke and mirrors, no matter what my boss said about storytelling.

Many of our workplace problems have evident solutions made possible by software — for example, Google Docs, a miracle program that replaced back-and-forth documents and version control with fluid, collaborative workflow. But like many in the PowerPoint mines, I'm not sure what alternative could possibly replace slides at scale.

Zeck was born in 2022 out of its cofounders' rage at decks, especially in board meetings. "At our prior companies, the shortest deck we ever sent was 134 pages," Zeck's cofounder Robert Wolfe tells me, adding that "there was nothing more stressful" about preparing for those meetings. He says that at CrowdRise, the company he ran with his brother Jeffrey and Edward Norton, they'd stop all other work for 100 hours before every board meeting in order to write and build the quarterly decks they hated enough to found Zeck. In a nod to Norton, Wolfe integrated a "Fight Club" reference into the origin story on Zeck's website: "The meeting I just sat through was like the scene in Fight Club where you punch yourself in the face over and over."

To Wolfe, the deck model "literally creates antagonism" — everyone becomes an editor with a red pen, the deck presenting endless entry points for criticism. In the military or an everyday office, grunts and junior designers hate working on PowerPoints, tweaking pixels and making rounds of edits that drive everyone crazy, because in PowerPoint you're often not working on the idea, but only on the presentation of the idea.

Zeck proposes that the solution to the deck is a collaborative website. A Zeck site feels a bit like a Notion site but with tweaks that work well for the boardroom — it gives everyone edit access, is encrypted, can be personalized, and offers links so that your chief financial officer or finance team can access full reports and charts and important information. It is a revelation to not have that information simplified in a slide in a meeting where everyone has to sit through everything. And in Zeck's pitch I find a great clarity equaled so far only by Tufte himself: When we remove the awful slide deck, once again "the meeting can be a meeting." So far, Zeck counts among its clients Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, furniture maker Floyd, and the rocket startup Phantom Space Corporation.

While Zeck is unlikely to supplant PowerPoint any time soon, Wolfe thinks people are finally rebelling against the idea "that you only have Office and all the tools that go with it, or a Google Drive and all the tools that go with it." He makes a brazen prediction: "I would be shocked if in 18 months or five years people are still using flat slides for meetings that should be collaborative."

We aren't yet letting go of decks in business, but we've let them hop the fence into our wider culture, both celebrating and undermining their repressive formality and ubiquity. The post-irony generations are throwing "PowerPoint parties," and some singles, sick of dating apps, are using PowerPoint to make their cases as mates. A 2021 episode of the Bravo reality show "Summer House" featured a subplot built around a romantic gesture delivered via PowerPoint. For some, slides may be a love language. There are even famous decks now, like this 300-pager in which a hedge-fund excoriated Olive Garden's business practices, or, my favorite, Jennifer Egan's PowerPoint chapter from her 2010 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, "A Visit from the Goon Squad."

Egan tells me she got a crash course in the program from her business-world sister, who "thinks in PowerPoint." The formal experiment of a PowerPoint chapter was exciting, though the "cold, corporate vibe" was perhaps incompatible with real, genuine emotion and the stuff contained in great novels. She suggests this tension gives the finished chapter — "Great Rock and Roll Pauses," the 12-year-old protagonist Alison Blake's account of her autistic brother's favorite pauses in classic rock songs interspersed with descriptions of their mom and dad coming and going, fighting and reflecting — its power. The chapter delivers earnest emotion without being schlocky, and is brave and hilarious without being corny. Egan says she isn't typically this type of writer, but the PowerPoint format gave her the ability to tell "this very sweet story in a cold holder."

Perhaps the PowerPoint parties and Egan have it right and we should let PowerPoint do what it does best: tell stories. For Egan, a deck arguably won a Pulitzer. For NASA, a deck arguably killed astronauts. In the big middle between those outcomes, we're still deciding whether a story is always what's necessary — and what to do about decks.

Matt Alston's writing has appeared in Wired, Rolling Stone, Playboy, and Believer. He trained as a civil engineer, and now works as a copywriter in tech. He lives in Maine with his wife and daughter.