How McKinsey Uses AI to End Dependence on PowerPoint: Restructuring the Consulting Industry Workflow

From Slide Factory to AI-Driven Workflow

For a long time, the workflow of the consulting industry has been deeply tied to PowerPoint—large volumes of analyses, hypotheses, and proposals are carried through slides, and even project management revolves around an ever-evolving "working document." However, McKinsey's latest practices show that this convention is being completely upended by AI.

Kate Smaje, McKinsey's global head of technology and AI, says that internal PowerPoint usage has dropped sharply within just a few months—both in terms of the number of presentations created and the time employees spend in PowerPoint. What's more noteworthy is that this change did not come from administrative mandates, but from consultants' spontaneous behavior: they have begun using AI "vibe-coding" tools to replace slides, shifting their focus to more efficient collaboration platforms.

Client Visualization Hub: A Real-Time, Unified Knowledge Nexus

Louis-Charles Généreux, an engagement manager at McKinsey, built an AI-powered website called the "Client Visualization Hub" while serving a North American cable TV company. The project involved about 70 people; the traditional management approach relied on a weekly working document, but version chaos and information lag persisted.

The new site, deployed on McKinsey's internal platform Platform McKinsey, uses Cloudflare to ensure security and is accessible only to project members. The team took dozens of HTML files (containing analyses, visualizations, tables, and text) and used AI to package them into interactive web pages. Project progress updates in real time, and at the end of each week, the system automatically generates podcast-style summaries and memos so that team members from different backgrounds can synchronize their understanding.

"Under the old model, I would often cite a certain data point in meetings while others might have missed the update," Généreux said. "Now everyone sees exactly the same, most current content." This structured, searchable centralized knowledge repository significantly reduces the information gap between engineering teams, product owners, and executives.

AI Reshapes Value Creation: From 'Week One Answer' to 'Hour One Answer'

McKinsey's global CEO Bob Sternfels revealed earlier this year that the firm has 40,000 human employees and 25,000 AI agents. Five months later, Smaje noted that the number of AI agents has "grown several times over," and AI is becoming the "lifeline" of McKinsey's work.

Smaje emphasized that the role of AI is not to replace consultants' judgment, but to accelerate the core aspects of value creation. In the past, teams needed a week to form an initial hypothesis (the "week one answer"); now, AI compresses this cycle into the "hour one answer." Consultants can delve deeper into the branches of the problem tree much earlier, instead of spending days on initial direction-setting."We hold 'dojo meetings' or hackathons several times a week to explore ideas that previously could only remain as remote hypotheses," Généreux said. "Now we have both the time and the tools to quickly validate the value of these ideas."

Structural Transformation of the Consulting Industry

The impact of AI on the consulting industry goes far beyond the tool level. It is shaking up traditional billing models, talent structures, training methods, and where value is created. As AI agents begin to take on a large portion of knowledge work, the core capabilities of human consultants shift toward pattern recognition, conceptual problem-solving, and helping clients take action.

It is worth noting that PowerPoint has not completely disappeared—it has been relegated to one of the final output formats, used for formal presentations or emails. But real analysis, reasoning, and collaboration increasingly take place within AI tools. Consultants log into the system not to open PowerPoint, but to engage in "vibe-coding" in an AI environment: analyzing data, accepting AI's challenges to logic, and then converting the work results into the required format with one click.

Long-term Perspective: A Paradigm Shift in Knowledge Workflows

McKinsey's practice demonstrates how AI can fundamentally restructure the operating model of professional service firms. This is not just an efficiency improvement, but a reconstruction of the value chain: deliverables shift from static slides to dynamic, interactive knowledge platforms; the pace of work shifts from weekly updates to real-time synchronization; and creativity shifts from being consumed by document production to focusing on insights themselves.

For the global consulting industry, this transformation is a benchmark. When an industry leader like McKinsey voluntarily abandons its reliance on PowerPoint, other firms face the choice of following or falling behind. A deeper question is: when AI can automatically generate analysis, organize information, and even propose hypotheses, how can consulting firms redefine their value to clients? The answer may lie not in tools, but in the judgment, trust, and actionability that only humans can provide.

But the prerequisite is that consulting firms must fully embrace AI and embed it into every link of their business structure—not just as an auxiliary tool. McKinsey has already taken this step, and its competitors are watching or following suit. The next decade of the global business consulting industry will be reshaped by this transformation.