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Case study tempalte 2
By the time ChatGPT took the world by storm in November 2022, McKinsey had been grappling with an inscrutable problem for
THE OPPORTUNITY
Transform knowledge management, then the way we work
By the time ChatGPT took the world by storm in November 2022, McKinsey had been grappling with an inscrutable problem for decades—making the voluminous business knowledge it had documented over the course of its then 96-year history readily available to employees.
“Knowledge is the life force of McKinsey,” explains Kitti Lakner, an associate partner and Lilli product leader. “But, despite numerous efforts over the years to bring it all together, we were still spending too much time hunting for the right information and firm experts when we needed them.”
It quickly became clear that generative AI (gen AI) offered an opportunity to not only help solve this thorny challenge but also completely transform the way we work with clients.
Lilli’s North Star
Build a generative AI platform powered by our firm’s knowledge to shorten the time to insights for our teams and the time to impact for our clients, and rewire the way we work.
Learn how we built a next-gen platform to transform our client work
By the time ChatGPT took the world by storm in November 2022, McKinsey had been grappling with an inscrutable problem for decades—making the voluminous business knowledge it had documented over the course of its then 96-year history readily available to employees.
“Knowledge is the life force of McKinsey,” explains Kitti Lakner, an associate partner and Lilli product leader. “But, despite numerous efforts over the years to bring it all together, we were still spending too much time hunting for the right information and firm experts when we needed them.”
It quickly became clear that generative AI (gen AI) offered an opportunity to not only help solve this thorny challenge but also completely transform the way we work with clients.
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ROAS from proven, conversion-focused campaigns.
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Industries, proven results everytime
THE OPPORTUNITY
Much more than a research partner
Since Lilli’s firmwide rollout in July 2023, the platform has been widely adopted, with 72 percent of the firm active on the platform, and colleagues reporting up to 30 percent time savings in searching and synthesizing knowledge. More than 500,000 prompts every month (and growing) help colleagues around the world and across functions in numerous ways, including the following:
· quickly getting up to speed on unfamiliar topics
· accessing and learning McKinsey frameworks and methodologies
· cleaning and analyzing data
· researching industry trends
· finding internal subject-matter experts
· creating drafts of meeting agendas and project work plans
· developing presentations in McKinsey’s style and format
· pushing team thinking toward more-creative solutions
72%
of firm members active
on Lilli
And they can engage with Lilli confident that all interactions and data are secure thanks to McKinsey’s relentless focus on risk controls and security from day one.
While it’s still early days, we see the beginnings of a shift in how we operate. For example, colleagues and leaders now think more critically about how they create and codify knowledge, with an eye toward how it can enhance Lilli’s capabilities. And colleagues have reshaped their workflows to incorporate the power of Lilli.
"I’ve adopted Lilli in my day-to-day workflow. I don’t have to start from zero anymore—I can get a head start on any project I have. It has been a game changer for my career."
Executive Assistant, Phoenix
Perhaps more important than the benefits we’ve realized internally are those we’ve been able to share with clients. The hands-on experience we’ve gained from developing and evolving Lilli provides valuable guidance for hundreds of clients pursuing their own gen AI endeavors. And we offer them a version of the architecture underlying our gen AI platform that is customizable for their organization’s specific work and industry—a key to both platform adoption and competitive advantage.
“Our clients are getting value from specialized knowledge agents similar to Lilli that are tuned to assist their employees with tasks specific to their workflow and industry. They appreciate learning from our experience creating agents in a scalable and responsible way that drives adoption,” says Delphine Zurkiya, the senior partner responsible for extending such solutions to our clients.
1. Blind scoring of the quality of outputs from participants with and without Lilli, using a predefined five-point scale for accuracy, content richness, and distinctiveness.
"In our work with clients, we’ve observed that the leading companies are the ones focused on reimagining entire workflows with gen AI and designing a tech stack that is robust, cost-efficient, and scalable for years to come."
Senior Partner and global leader of QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey
THE REVIRING
Learning by doing
When we kicked off the Lilli project, few—if any—large organizations had built anything like it. The ongoing development journey has been exciting, challenging, and filled with lessons. Following our
Rewired framework has proven critical in guiding us through the process.
"Our business-led roadmap isn’t about building a tool; it’s about transforming how we manage and access knowledge and expertise, which is the foundation of our organization and competitive advantage."
Senior Partner and leader of McKinsey’s technology practices and firm’s AI transformation
1. Rewiring with Lilli
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2. Building Lilli at the speed of change
ChatGPT and similar tools were gaining rapid attention in early 2023. McKinsey wanted to give users a fully secure tool as soon as possible to provide colleagues with a safe way to tap into the power of large language models (LLMs). Time—and security—was of the essence, so McKinsey moved quickly to mobilize the Lilli effort.
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Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.
WHAT'S NEXT
Innovating to meet new challenges
A year after launch, the Lilli team continues to deliver a robust pipeline of improvements, both in the core experience and in feature innovations. The most anticipated new features? The addition of agents built to automate specific time-consuming tasks and expansion of Lilli’s slide-building capabilities.
While adoption continues to grow, there’s more work to do to boost regular engagement with the platform. Lilli upgrades make up only a fraction of the effort to that end—providing continued education, fostering gen AI enthusiast communities, and employee skill development will continue to stand front and center to drive our transformation.
Meanwhile, our colleagues at QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey, are working with clients to bring the power of Lilli to their own organizations to help them with everything from creating a request-for-proposal engine to speeding their drug development operations. These colleagues bring with them the innovations of QuantumBlack Labs, which regularly contributes its code to open source and has developed more than 25 proprietary tools and industry-specific applications to help organizations bring AI to bear at speed and scale.
While the future opportunity for generative AI is still being written, Erik reflects on the journey McKinsey has taken with Lilli so far: “We have created something that I believe will change the way we serve our clients. We have the opportunity to set up our firm for success in its next century and perhaps redefine our industry.”
"I’ve adopted Lilli in my day-to-day workflow. I don’t have to start from zero anymore—I can get a head start on any project I have. It has been a game changer for my career."
Executive Assistant, Phoenix
By the time ChatGPT took the world by storm in November 2022, McKinsey had been grappling with an inscrutable problem for decades—making the voluminous business knowledge it had documented over the course of its then 96-year history readily available to employees.
“Knowledge is the life force of McKinsey,” explains Kitti Lakner, an associate partner and Lilli product leader. “But, despite numerous efforts over the years to bring it all together, we were still spending too much time hunting for the right information and firm experts when we needed them.”
It quickly became clear that generative AI (gen AI) offered an opportunity to not only help solve this thorny challenge but also completely transform the way we work with clients.