McKinsey Shifts Workforce Structure Using AI at CES 2026

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Bob Sternfels, Global Managing Partner of McKinsey & Company, announced a workforce restructuring strategy driven by artificial intelligence. Under a "25 squared" approach, the firm is growing client-facing roles by 25% while reducing non-client-facing roles by approximately 25%. This shift allowed the firm to increase overall output by 10% and save 1.5 million hours in search and synthesis work last year.

Sternfels reported that McKinsey has integrated 25,000 personalized AI agents to handle entire job functions alongside 40,000 human employees. He expects the number of AI agents to equal the human headcount by the end of the year. Sternfels characterized this as a new paradigm for incumbent entities, stating that large organizations must increase their speed or "transform or die."

The discussion on AI's impact on labor sparked a debate among executives. Hemant Taneja, CEO of General Catalyst, argued that the traditional model of spending 20 years learning and 40 years working is broken, necessitating constant re-skilling. In contrast, Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman criticized the replacement of entry-level workers with AI, asserting that such a move destroys the talent pipeline essential for a healthy organization.