McKinsey wants ambitious technologists, not just MBAs
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Lakshmi Varanasi
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McKinsey seeks engineers as AI reshapes consulting
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Once famous for its ties to business schools, McKinsey is casting a wider net to meet its needs.
For decades, an MBA was one of the clearest routes into elite consulting. As AI changes the work firms do for clients, the consulting industry is looking for people who can build technology as well as devise the corporate strategy around it.
"Our recruiting changed dramatically in the last few years. We recruit from places we haven't recruited before," Ben Ellencweig, who leads McKinsey's AI arm, QuantumBlack, told Business Insider. "Today many, many of our colleagues are coming from non-MBA backgrounds, and then technology too is kind of the next wave."
That includes mathematicians, computer-science PhDs, startup founders without degrees, and people with experience at technology companies.
The shift is playing out beyond McKinsey. Job postings from Deloitte, PwC, EY, KPMG, McKinsey, BCG, and Bain fell by about 24% in the year ending May 2026 compared to the year before, according to labor-market intelligence firm Draup. At the same time, AI jobs grew from 1.4% to 5% of their total openings.
The number of forward-deployed-engineer openings across the seven firms rose from none to 1,404 in that same period, according to the analysis. Such roles require engineers who can deploy and run production AI systems inside organizations, and also do the client-facing work traditionally associated with consulting.
According to McKinsey's current job postings, most of those roles require at least four or five years of computer-related engineering experience.
Ellencweig said McKinsey is looking to fill these roles with "curious people" who are excited to work with clients and solve problems through technology, but who also bring deep technical skills. The firm is recruiting from different geographies, schools, and "outside-of-school, non-school backgrounds," he said.
In an email to Business Insider, the firm added that it is recruiting through "less traditional pathways," such ascoding programs and bootcamps.
QuantumBlack itself has grown from 47 data scientists working with a Formula 1 team to "well above 5,000" AI professionals over the past decade, Ellencweig said. Those workers include data scientists, data engineers, designers, product managers, and product owners.
McKinsey rival EY has recently spoken about its own push to widen its talent pool. Ginnie Carlier, EY Americas' chief talent and culture officer, told BI earlier this year that the Big Four firm was once exclusively made up of accountants, but now it also hires engineers, creatives, and technologists.
Ellencweig said McKinsey is reinventing itself around technology, including how it hires and how it develops current employees.
"I view our entire workforce, the entire McKinsey, including our consultant cohort, becoming very technology savvy," McKinsey's Ellencweig said.
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Lakshmi Varanasi
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Uber employees say AI is doing everything from writing support chat responses to answering questions in Slack
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Alex Bitter
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… %!s()
and
Agnes Applegate
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Some Uber employees said that they felt AI was one reason behind the company's layoffs earlier this month.
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At Uber, AI does everything from answering employees' questions in Slack to writing the response you get when you message customer service during a ride.
Six recently laid-off employees who spoke with Business Insider pointed to several ways that AI became more prevalent in their jobs over the past few months. Some said that they were prompting AI to do substantial portions of their work.
Uber declined to comment for this story. Earlier this month, the company laid off about 3,300 people, including all of the employees Business Insider spoke with for this article.
CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said at the time that the layoffs aimed to cut "management layers" and reduce the number of teams where managers had as few as one or two direct reports. Khosrowshahi didn't cite AI as a motivation in a memo announcing the layoffs.
At the same time, the employees who spoke with Business Insider said that the company has pushed ahead with implementing AI in a wide variety of uses.
One employee said that in the weeks before being laid off he was using an AI tool that reduced the time it took to do his job to one-fifth of what it used to be.
"AI definitely feels like the dynamite under the bridge for a lot of us," the employee said.
'Don't be using ChatGPT to do your work for you'
A laid-off employee in Uber's advertising business said that managers were increasingly urging them to use Gemini and ChatGPT to prepare for client meetings.
"We were asked to use AI all the time," the employee said. "It was part of our day-to-day work."
In many internal Slack channels, Uber uses an AI chatbot called Genie, which provides "prompt responses with proper citations from Uber's internal documentation," the company wrote in a blog post last year.
The chatbot provides answers to questions that employees post, the employee said, providing a lot of guidance that previously came from managers.
"If anybody else had an answer for you, then they replied," the employee said. "But it was usually AI replying to us about any questions we had."
Another employee who worked in customer service said that they used Glean, a similar tool trained on internal company documents, to respond to help requests from Uber drivers and passengers.
The tools were meant to help customer service agents find information, the employee said. They often copied and pasted answers from the tools directly into the chat.
"It wasn't what we were supposed to use, but it was a tool available to use when our knowledge base wasn't working," the employee said.
Other Uber employees said that their managers cautioned against that sort of AI use.
"We're also getting guidance like 'Don't be using ChatGPT to do your work for you,'" Kori X, a former evaluation specialist on Uber's GenAI team said.
"I think they're struggling with why they are paying these people if they're just using ChatGPT," X said.
Uber saw 'real tailwinds' from AI productivity
Another laid-off employee said that they didn't feel pressured to use AI at work.
The company took a measured approach to implementing AI compared to other tech companies, this employee said, offering office hours, explaining to employees what AI could and couldn't do, and curbing the use of AI-generated pictures in external communication.
Uber previously said it has used forward-deployed engineers in "agentic pods" to identify uses of AI across the company, from finance to HR.
Uber started cutting off or reducing credits to services like Claude in the first half of this year, the employee said.
Uber executives said around the same time that they had already spent their Claude budget for the year and that the company wasn't seeing productivity gains commensurate with what it was spending on AI tools.
In a presentation at an industry conference last week, Khosrowshahi cited some of the same justifications for the layoffs as in his memo the previous week.
Uber wanted to "have more doers versus managers," he said, and reduced the number of "micro-teams" where managers had as few as one or two direct reports.
At the same time, Uber saw an opportunity with the restructuring to take advantage of "real tailwinds as it relates to productivity, whether it is AI or general productivity technology as well," he said.
Do you have a story idea about Uber? Contact this reporter at [email protected] or via encrypted messaging app Signal at 808-854-4501. Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.
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Alex Bitter
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Alex Bitter is a senior retail reporter covering the gig economy, food, and retail. His work focuses major gig delivery and ride-hailing apps, including Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart, and Walmart's Spark. He is interested in everything from what it's like to work on the apps to the companies' business strategies.Some of his recent stories feature gig workers who have been deactivated on the apps, DoorDash hiring traditional employees to make deliveries, gig workers' use of bots, and gig work expanding into new professions, such as nursing.Alex has also written about Aldi's US expansion, Starbucks' turnaround efforts, and the fallout from Kraft-Heinz's budget cutting. Convenience store chain Sheetz ended its "smile policy" after his reporting.Before joining Insider in September 2020, he wrote about consumer and retail companies for S&P Global Market Intelligence. He's a graduate of the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa and grew up on the Big Island.Alex lives in the Washington, DC, area, where you can find him studying ancient coins or searching for Civil War artifacts with his metal detector in his free time.Got a tip? Reach out at [email protected] or via encrypted messaging app Signal at +1 (808) 854-4501.
Agnes Applegate
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Agnes Applegate is a senior associate editor at Business Insider on the Business Contributors and Freelance team. She writes and edits as-told-to articles and works with freelancers and contributors on personal essays covering a variety of topics, including AI-powered startups, AI careers, major career pivots, viral career moments, and job market strategies. She previously was a fellow on the Business Contributors and Freelance team and worked as a breaking news runner at The New York Post.
An Oregon man accused of killing five women has been indicted in connection with the death of a sixth woman, officials announced this week.
Jesse Calhoun was indicted by a grand jury on a charge of first-degree manslaughter in the death of Elizabeth “Libby” Gibson, said the Multnomah county district attorney on Wednesday. Calhoun is accused of causing Gibson’s death and acting “unlawfully and recklessly under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life”.
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Gibson, who lived in Portland, was 32 when she was last seen in 2022 and reported missing the following year. Officials believe she was killed on or around 18 November 2022 but have not found her body.
Calhoun, 41, has already been charged in the killings of Ashley Real, 22; Kristin Smith, 22; Charity Perry, 24; Bridget Webster, 31; and Joanna Speaks, 32, between 2022 and 2023. He has pleaded not guilty to five counts of second-degree murder and four counts of abuse of a corpse.
“We will not stop. We will do everything in our power to hold him accountable and see that justice is done for each and every one of these victims. We remain committed to these families for as long as it takes,” Nathan Vasquez, the Multnomah county district attorney, said in a statement.
Prosecutors said earlier this year that they plan to try Calhoun for all murders in one trial rather than holding separate proceedings.
Calhoun was previously incarcerated for assaulting a police officer, trying to strangle a police dog, burglary and other charges. He was released early in 2021 for helping fight wildfires through a prison program, but Oregon’s governor’s reversed the decision in 2023 when he came under investigation for the deaths.
Gibson’s family said in a statement that they were “grateful that a definitive step toward justice is finally being taken”.
“Libby was kind, creative, and silly. She welcomed everyone with love and acceptance. Her future was tragically taken from her way too soon,” her siblings said in the statement.
“We are deeply appreciative of the tireless work and dedication of the law enforcement officers and the district attorney’s office whose efforts have helped bring us to this point.”
Melissa Marrero, the senior deputy district attorney, said the scope of the investigation had been “enormous”.
“But all information is useful. And to the extent that individuals have been willing to come forward in the past and provide information to us, no matter how small, that information has led us to where we are here today,” she said in a statement. %!s()
The fallout of the Hyundai and Kia car theft epidemic is far from over. Roughly 200 insurance companies are seeking reimbursement from the automakers for claims and related costs stemming from vehicles that were stolen or damaged during attempted thefts; and according to a report by the Los Angeles Times, those claims could exceed $1 billion.
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The trouble started a few years ago, when a group of young people who called themselves the “Kia Boyz” begain posting on social media how easy it was to steal certain Hyundai and Kia vehicles. Thefts of these vehicles then skyrocketed, which led to lawsuits from around the country as well as new anti-theft software being installed on both companies’ cars.
However, one of the most significant lawsuits came from California, where roughly 200 insurance companies sued the manufacturers claiming that they deliberately stopped installing engine immobilizer devices in vehicles that were bound for America. That compliant was dismissed when U.S. District Judge James V. Selna ruled that his court did not have jurisdiction over foreign manufacturers; however, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals just reversed his decision this week.
The reversal doesn’t necessarily mean Hyundai and Kia will necessarily have to pay the $1 billion in claims related to the thefts. However, it does allow the lawsuit to proceed. The reason for the reversal, according to the Court of Appeals, is that because the Korean automakers put the vehicles on ships headed to the Golden State, there was enough to establish a connection with the state.
DREW PHILLIPS
“By placing the vehicles on ships bound for California ports, the Korean entities purposefully availed themselves of the forum and purposefully aimed their goods at California,” wrote Circuit Judge Eric D. Miller in the ruling. The case will now be returned to Judge Selna’s district court.
But while a billion dollars is potentially at stake, the larger story may be just how long this problem continues following Hyundai and Kia. It may be a long time before they stop: according to a recent UCLA study, the spike of Hyundai and Kia thefts in Los Angeles will continue through at least 2042. %!s()
Critics say Serbia’s military ties with Israel are rising significantly.
Serbia has opened a factory to assemble advanced Israeli-made drones, which will supply the Serbian military and armed forces in other countries.
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Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic inaugurated the facility jointly operated with an unnamed Israeli company on Thursday.
“Our plans are huge,” Vucic said in a social media post showing a video of him touring the facility with Israeli Ambassador Avivit Bar-Ilan, adding that at least three more factories will be opened across Serbia with Israeli partners.
Vucic said the facility “will employ around 100 workers and produce state-of-the-art equipment both for the Serbian Armed Forces and the armies of some other countries”.
Vucic did not disclose the factory’s location or the Israeli firm involved, saying journalists were excluded from the opening because of “the confidentiality of the production process”.
Previous reporting by investigative outlet BIRN and Israeli newspaper Haaretz has identified Israeli defence firm Elbit Systems as Serbia’s partner in the drone-manufacturing process.
Elbit has previously been criticised over its role in operations in Gaza and the West Bank.
Last month, Vucic told Serbian news outlet Nezavisne Dnevne Novine that the goal of the factory was to “preserve peace and stability, and to be strong enough to deter all potential aggressors”.
Serbia is one of the few countries in the Western Balkans that is not a NATO member, and it has invested heavily in its military to “preserve neutrality”.
It has faced scrutiny over arms exports to Israel, which BIRN and Haaretz said rose from 1.4 million euros ($1.6 million) in 2023 to 42.3 million euros ($48.5 million) in 2024.
During a visit to Serbia earlier this year, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories Francesca Albanese said Belgrade remained one of Israel’s “most steadfast and determined allies” despite calls for more countries to restrict weapons exports due to the war in Gaza. %!s()
