Big questions revolve around the real impact of AI – and consultants are rushing to provide the answers.
Over the past year, consulting firms have begun deploying armies of AI agents to work on transform their own operations and advise customers to do the same: by automating search, creating task-specific tools, and creating proprietary AI models.
CEO of McKinsey & Company Bob Sternfels said last month that his company had launched tens of thousands of in-house AI agents in recent years and planned to have one for all of the company’s 40,000 employees.
Faced with rapid deployment, consultants now ask themselves a difficult question: is it worth it? They work to measure whether AI actually improves performance, increases revenue, and allows consultants to focus on higher-value work.
“I think we’re now in the age of confusion,” Mina Alaghband, a former McKinsey associate who is now chief client officer at Writer, a comprehensive enterprise AI platform designed for agentic AI, told Business Insider.
Alaghband said that a year ago, most companies focused on adoption, tracking metrics like how often a tool was used.
Today, she says, the focus should be on measuring the value created, such as how much human labor is reallocated to higher-value work or improved incomes.
PwC’s AI director, Dan Priest, recently told Business Insider that PwC is now less concerned with how many agents it deploysand even more with the number of human users each agent has.
Priest said his company starts by targeting an “impact area,” such as improving the customer experience.
In these impact areas, The company is looking to deploy “specialized AI agents” who have earned that designation because they are good at what they do, Priest said. “When we deploy agents, we want to see a high rate of human adoption, which means more humans using them,” he said.
EY also prioritizes quality over quantity, Steve Newman, EY’s global engineering director, told Business Insider. The company tracks the value created by its AI agents through key performance indicators in productivity, quality and profitability on a monthly basis.
If the decisive promises of the AI boom are speed and efficiency, then the metric that may matter most is not utilization, but time recovered.
Boston Consulting Group tracks its agents using this metric — and whether that time is then reinvested in higher-value work, Dallas-based partner and managing director Scott Wilder told Business Insider.
Wilder said the company’s employees now spend about 15% less time on low-value activities, like creating slideshows, and those people reinvest about 70% of their saved time in higher-value activities, such as more in-depth analytics.
Saved time doesn’t always mean more work. At BCG, this can mean more free time. Wilder said BCG found that employees retain about 30% of the time AI saves. “They get a little more sleep or can go to a yoga class or whatever someone wants to do,” he said.
Nearly a century ago, economist John Keynes predicted that as productivity increased, the balance between work and leisure would inevitably change.
“I predict that the standard of living in progressive countries a hundred years from now will be between four and eight times higher than it is now,” he wrote in his 1930 essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.”
It’s almost 2030, but on a small scale, this vision may already be surfacing.
“It benefits them — and it’s hard work, so every hour of free time counts,” Wilder said.
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