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Key Takeaways McKinsey has sharply reduced the time spent manually building slide decks as consultants increasingly rely on internal generative AI tools to draft presentations and proposals.
Around three-quarters of employees now use the firm’s proprietary platform, Lilli.
Lilli handles search, synthesis and first-draft slide creation from simple text prompts.
A core part of the consulting job at McKinsey is creating PowerPoint presentations — but new technology is changing the game.
Kate Smaje, McKinsey’s global leader for technology and AI, recently told Business Insider that use of PowerPoint at the firm has dropped sharply in the past few months. Instead of manually building slide decks, many teams now use AI to generate full presentations from text prompts. They use internal AI tools to assemble outlines and charts in minutes.
The center of this shift is Lilli, McKinsey’s proprietary generative AI platform that sits on top of the firm’s knowledge base. Since its rollout in July 2023, three-quarters of employees have adopted Lilli, feeding the AI more than 500,000 prompts every month, McKinsey reported.
The firm designed Lilli to pull from McKinsey’s internal documents, past client work and proprietary research while keeping confidential data secret. Consultants can feed in a problem statement or a short brief and ask the system to generate draft slides, synthesize findings or standardize tone across a proposal.
How Lilli has impacted McKinsey
Smaje described Lilli as a virtual team member for every task. She said that Lilli’s capabilities have developed enough to take over “at least some of the tasks typically performed by junior employees,” including drafting slide decks and proposal documents.
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