McKinsey consultants are using PowerPoint far less thanks to AI tools

Working on consulting projects has long meant producing slides — enormous quantities of them. At McKinsey, however, artificial intelligence is changing that habit in a significant and measurable way.

PowerPoint use drops sharply

Kate Smaje, McKinsey's Global Leader for technology and AI, told Business Insider that she has witnessed a dramatic decline in PowerPoint usage at the firm within just a couple of months. As employees have begun using AI tools to vibe-code their way through projects, both the number of presentations being created and the time spent within the programme have fallen considerably.

Beyond formal client-facing presentations, consultants have traditionally relied on PowerPoint as a project-management tool — a working deck that functions as a running record of ongoing research and next steps, typically sent to clients at the close of each week.

A new approach takes shape

One McKinsey consultant has devised an alternative. Louis-Charles Généreux, an engagement manager at the firm, has built an AI-assisted website he refers to as the "client visualisation hub," created for his current project with a North American cable company.

The project involves approximately 70 people who require access to up-to-date information in real time. Previously, Généreux would have managed this through the traditional slide deck approach — but that method came with its frustrations.

"The traditional issue that I faced a lot, especially as an earlier engagement manager, was me being in a meeting and referring to it, and others having missed that," said Généreux.

Once a deck had been distributed, version control complications would quickly set in. As updates were added and circulated through email threads, multiple versions of the same document would begin to circulate, leaving different members of the team working from differing information.

How the website works

To build the hub, Généreux used Platform McKinsey, the firm's internal self-service store for approved products, locating a deployment tool capable of hosting the site securely. The team had a repository of dozens of HTML files — covering analysis, visuals, tables, and text — which they used AI to package into interactive web pages.

The site was launched through a firm-approved system using McKinsey credentials on Cloudflare, with access restricted to those directly involved in the project. AI also maintains the site's currency: as the project develops, the platform updates in real time, and at each week's end the system produces both a podcast-style summary and a written memo for the team to review.

The website has saved time and reduced the disconnect between engineering teams, product owners, and senior executives, Généreux said. "Everyone, irrespective of their knowledge or skills, sees the exact same thing."

PowerPoint has not vanished from McKinsey entirely, he noted, but it now functions as a final output — for presentations, e-mails, or memos — rather than the central space where daily work takes place. "The real work," he said, is increasingly happening inside AI tools, where consultants carry out analysis, stress-test their thinking, and then translate their output into whichever format is required.

AI becomes the lifeblood of consulting

The broader consulting industry sits at the heart of the AI transformation sweeping through workplaces. Leading firms including McKinsey, BCG, Deloitte, and IBM are simultaneously advising clients on AI adoption whilst overhauling their own internal processes using the same technology. The shift is raising fresh questions about pricing models, talent pipelines, training, and how value is defined — particularly as AI agents begin to take on knowledge work once performed exclusively by humans.

Earlier this year, McKinsey's chief executive Bob Sternfels stated that the firm's workforce comprised 40,000 humans and 25,000 AI agents. Just five months later, Smaje told Business Insider that the number of agents is already "many multiples of that," with AI becoming part of the "lifeblood" of how McKinsey operates.

Smaje was keen to stress that the shift is not entirely new. Consultants' value has long extended beyond the production of research alone, and the profession had already been evolving well before the AI wave arrived. Their true worth, she argued, lies in judgement, pattern recognition, conceptual problem-solving, and helping clients act on their findings.

From week one to hour one

What AI is now doing, Smaje continued, is illuminating precisely where and how value is created for clients — and dramatically accelerating the entire process. At McKinsey, AI has compressed the early problem-solving cycle, transforming what once constituted a team's "week one answer" — the initial hypothesis arrived at after a week of research — into an "hour one answer."

That efficiency gain allows consultants to devote more time to exploring deeper layers of a problem rather than spending days simply getting their bearings.

In practice, Généreux said his team was putting the additional time to use by holding "dojo sessions or hackathons" several times a week — exploring avenues that would previously have remained distant 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.