McKinsey Chief Is Looking for These 3 Skills in the A.I. Era

Among all the white-collar jobs threatened by A.I., management consulting—a purely idea-based occupation that relies heavily on analytical and problem-solving skills—sits near the front of displacement fears. As reasoning LLMs and A.I. agents take on many junior-level tasks faster and more accurately, major firms like McKinsey, Accenture and the “Big Four” are cutting jobs and rethinking how they hire.

That doesn’t necessarily mean consulting is disappearing. For college graduates and young professionals who still aspire to the field, it simply means a different set of skills and qualities will be required to succeed. On Tuesday (Jan. 6), Bob Sternfels, McKinsey & Company’s board chair and global managing partner—the firm’s top role—shared those criteria during a talk at CES 2026.

Sternfels highlighted three skills that will continue to matter in an A.I.-infused world:

• Aspire. Setting the right goals and inspiring others to believe in them—essentially leadership and direction-setting.
• Judgment. The ability to distinguish right from wrong and to prioritize effectively. “A.I. models don’t know right or wrong. Humans need to set the right parameters, whether based on a company’s values or societal norms,” Sternfels said.
• Creativity. A recurring theme among leaders across industries. A.I. is still built on “inference models,” Sternfels said, and the ability to generate new ideas from nothing remains a fundamentally human skill that machines won’t replace anytime soon.

For decades, the consulting world was heavily defined by pedigree. But in the A.I. era, “where you went to school matters a lot less,” Sternfels said. In tech, he noted, hiring increasingly focuses on signals of capability rather than credentials—“not what university you graduated from, but what your GitHub profile looks like. That means a wider set of people can enter the workforce with different pathways.”

Sternfels was joined onstage by Hemant Taneja, CEO of venture capital firm General Catalyst, and angel investor Jason Calacanis for a live taping of the popular All-In podcast. On creativity, Taneja added, “Learning how to ask the right questions and solving hard problems are very different mindsets. It’s about curiosity and kind of back to being kids.”

McKinsey recently made headlines for cutting hundreds of back-office jobs as A.I. automates parts of its operations. Putting a specific number on the impact for the first time, Sternfels said the firm is reducing non-client-facing headcount by 25 percent while seeing a 10 percent productivity gain from A.I.

A more telling number, though, is that the firm is also increasing its client-facing staff by 25 percent, Sternfels said, which amounts to an “unprecedented number of new hires, because the work is changing.”

McKinsey employs about 43,000 people globally, according to its website, with headcount roughly evenly split between client-facing and back-office roles. That balance is apparently shifting as the firm staffs its business differently.

The learning gap

However, one question that the consulting industry has yet to find a satisfactory answer to is how to train and develop talent in the A.I. era. And elite universities don’t seem to be preparing students for it, either.

Entry-level consultants have traditionally spent significant time reading documents and performing repetitive work. Such grunt work was not only part of the workflow but also the primary way junior employees learned and progressed. As those tasks become easier to automate, new hires risk losing opportunities to build skills, judgment and character.

“There’s a massive gap in resilience,” Sternfels said. “You’re gonna get knocked out. The question is: do you get back up? And how do you get back up? I think the educational system today doesn’t necessarily build individual capability in resilience.”