With artificial intelligence (AI) top of mind for executives, McKinsey has been hard at work supplying insights and counsel to help business leaders understand how to leverage its power in their organization.
Many senior executives ask McKinsey to help them understand not only where AI can be applied, but how it works “under the hood.” They’re reading in the media about terms such as “deep learning,” “machine learning,” and “reinforcement learning,” and they look to us to explain these AI methods at a granular level.
In response, we recently published an interactive guide to AI that allows executives to drill as deep as they’d like into AI concepts—from high-level definitions all the way down to specific algorithms and their potential business use cases. The guide has already become a blockbuster, garnering nearly 100,000 views in just a few weeks.
In addition, we teamed with some of the top minds at leading tech firms such as Google and Microsoft to provide executives with insights into the technical limitations of AI today and the solutions in development to solve them.
In terms of direct client work, McKinsey now supports many clients on AI-related initiatives. For example, working with QuantumBlack, we were able to enroll patients in clinical trials 10-15% faster using AI and machine learning, a fact the CEO of Novartis blogged about at Davos. And we helped another client improve a “best-in-class” fraud detection algorithm by 30% using deep learning. The demand for such work continues to accelerate as AI technologies become increasingly capable of providing real value to businesses.