The Guardian AI·
White-collar work is at risk across the board, including at elite consulting firms that used to be a pathway to the 1% Consulting is a delicate contract: endure two challenging, formative years – and in return, get a golden ticket to anywhere. Firms like McKinsey tout themselves as the “CEO factory”, and boast they’re “not surprised” to be consistently named the best place for future leaders. The skills they promise to build – synthesis, sharp analysis, crisp communication, client-readiness, hypothesis-driven thinking – have enticed every generation’s top graduates. Get an offer from a place like this, and everything else will fall into place: about as clear a guarantee of future success as you could get fresh out of a bachelors. These firms spent decades marketing themselves as production houses of excellence, and until recently, they were. Alice Lassman is an economist who writes The Intimacy Economy, a Substack and forthcoming book on the economics of connection, care and relationsh
Read full articleYou know the meeting. The board wants an AI agent strategy by end of quarter. Someone on the leadership team has read a McKinsey report. You’ve been voluntold to build the platform. The slide deck says “AI-native.” The acceptance criteria are vague. Somebody mentions LangGraph, and somebody else says, “We’ll just wrap it ourselves.” You […]
You know the meeting. The board wants an AI agent strategy by end of quarter. Someone on the leadership team has read a McKinsey report. You’ve been voluntold to build the platform. The slide deck says “AI-native.” The acceptance criteria are vague. Somebody mentions LangGraph, and somebody else says, “We’ll just wrap it ourselves.” You […]
“The future of AI should be accessible, available, and open to people and builders everywhere, and it should not require an absurd amount of resources only available to a handful of cloud providers,” Paolo Ardoino, CEO, Tether. About 700 million people use generative AIs like Gemini and ChatGPT weekly, but adoption is far from uniform. McKinsey’s 2025 State of AI survey found that nearly half of respondents from companies with more than $5 billion in revenue have reached the AI scaling phase, compared with just 29 percent of those from companies with less than $100 million in revenue, a gap that only widens further down the chain, locking out smaller businesses, developers, and everyday users. Retail and small businesses are limited to basic AI utilities that their facilities can power, such as text-based inference and multimedia generation, using base models. That is billions of end users, and developers locked out of full utilization and development of intelligent software due to hi
Rebuilding US manufacturing could reshape investment flows, but operational challenges in workforce, energy, and infrastructure remain critical. The post McKinsey estimates $2T needed to rebuild US manufacturing capacity appeared first on Crypto Briefing.
Rebuilding US manufacturing could reshape investment flows, but operational challenges in workforce, energy, and infrastructure remain critical. The post McKinsey estimates $2T needed to rebuild US manufacturing capacity appeared first on Crypto Briefing.
Clients are questioning the value of advice while getting more used to fees based on successful task completion
The trend shows no sign of slowing. McKinsey’s latest The State of AI report suggests that 88% of organizations now use AI in at least one business function. As adoption expands, so too will experimentation and tool creation — much of it occurring outside traditional IT processes and often beyond formal oversight. For IT leaders, the implications are significant. They are no longer managing a closed, centrally controlled environment, but one where technology can emerge anywhere, spread rapidly, and influence core business processes in ways that are difficult to predict or contain. “Shadow usage is dramatically outpacing production,” said Chris Drumgoole, president of global infrastructure services at IT service provider DXC Technology. In many organizations, unofficial AI usage already exceeds sanctioned deployments by several multiples. Worse, he said, IT teams often have very little visibility into where and how these tools are being used. From rollout to invisible adoption What’s ha
The rapid automation of white-collar jobs could reshape workforce dynamics, emphasizing the need for regulatory adaptation and skill evolution. The post Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman predicts full automation of white-collar work in 18 months appeared first on Crypto Briefing.
