McKinsey consultants are using the firm’s proprietary AI platform to take over tasks that have traditionally been handled by junior employees.

According to Kate Smaje, McKinsey’s global head of technology and AI, the use of the internal AI platform, Lilli, has been on the rise among the company’s employees, as she mentioned in an interview with Bloomberg on Monday. Although staff members have the option to use ChatGPT within the company, Lilli is the exclusive platform that permits the secure entry of confidential client information.

Smaje revealed that more than 75% of McKinsey’s 43,000 personnel are now utilizing Lilli on a monthly basis. The platform was named in honor of Lillian Dombrowski, the first woman employed by McKinsey back in 1945.

With Lilli, McKinsey consultants have the capability to generate a PowerPoint presentation with a simple prompt and can adjust the presentation’s style using a feature called “Tone of Voice” to ensure it matches the firm’s communication style. Additionally, they can prepare project proposals, adhere to the firm’s standards, locate in-house subject matter experts, and study industry developments effectively.

Lilli has advanced enough to take over tasks typically assigned to junior employees, but Smaje says that doesn’t mean McKinsey is going to hire fewer junior analysts.

“Do we need armies of business analysts creating PowerPoints? No, the technology could do that,” Smaje told Bloomberg. “It’s not necessarily that I’m going to have fewer of them [analysts], but they’re going to be doing the things that are more valuable to our clients.”

McKinsey told Business Insider that Lilli was trained on the firm’s entire intellectual property, encompassing over 100,000 documents and interviews across the firm’s nearly 100-year history. McKinsey employees who use Lilli turn to it 17 times per week on average, a McKinsey senior partner told BI.

A case study published on McKinsey’s website shows that Lilli answers over half a million prompts every month, saving workers 30% of the time they would have spent on gathering and synthesizing information.

Consulting firms have been tapping into AI for years. Bain consultants have access to Sage, an AI chatbot powered by OpenAI. At Boston Consulting Group, employees use an AI tool called Deckster to fine-tune their PowerPoint presentations.

Meanwhile, at other companies, AI is taking over tasks once completed by human workers. IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said last month that the company replaced hundreds of human resources staff with AI, then used the freed-up resources to hire more programmers and salespeople.

A report from SignalFire, a venture capital firm that tracks over 650 million employees on LinkedIn, found that new graduates accounted for just 7% of new hires in 2024 at big tech companies, down 25% from 2023, as AI takes over entry-level tasks.