Anthropic, Cohere, and Mistral AI are just three of the 18 companies that have joined our enterprise generative AI (gen AI) ecosystem, which comprises the world’s most cutting-edge innovation leaders across technology and talent.
Gen AI has permeated our lives and promises to be the transformative technology of our time. We’re experiencing a whirlwind pace of innovation, meaning companies can no longer rely on choosing to build or buy off-the-shelf solutions as they look to implement and scale. To outcompete in today’s environment—as gen AI becomes more complex with new modalities like video, audio, text, and the technology’s increasingly refined level of reasoning—companies need to move from proof of concept to production at scale.
Creating value beyond the hype
However, 90 percent of pilots fail to reach full production. As we enter the next chapter of this massive technology shift, companies need collaborators to help them address the complexities of adopting and scaling gen AI.
“Enterprises need to get many elements right simultaneously—address unstructured data, develop advanced algorithms, build the right IT architecture, drive capability building, change management, and domain expertise, to name a few,” explains Ben Ellencweig, a senior partner who leads alliances, acquisitions, and partnerships globally for QuantumBlack, the AI consulting arm of McKinsey. “Few can do this on their own, and that’s why tapping into the multi-billion-dollar AI and gen AI space through collaborations is critical.”
Our ecosystem is the solution our clients need to adopt and scale gen AI. Business leaders see the increasing value of accessing the resources and cutting-edge technology from gen AI providers that will lead to value and drive domain transformation. Our ecosystem is the central hub for our clients to leverage expertise and solutions from 18 technology strategic alliances across all parts of the technology stack—from cloud infrastructure to LLM providers and encompassing topics like MLOps, data architecture, and capability building.
“An ecosystem is the best way to stay current and win in this space; it moves too quickly for prior conventional methods,” explains Ellencweig.
Our ecosystem is open and distinctive by design. To meet our client’s needs and aspirations, we adopt an open architecture: we build strategic alliances with leading players across all major technology stacks and work hand-in-glove with them to customize solutions and capture business value. Through this approach, we bring together the most cutting-edge technologists in the world—including long-standing large tech companies and bleeding-edge niche players—and McKinsey’s world-class assets, including recent acquisitions such as Candid for cloud computing, Caserta for data architecture, and Iguazio for machine learning and foundational model ops. Our ecosystem builds on McKinsey’s long-standing collaborations with AWS, Google Cloud, IBM, Microsoft, Salesforce, and SAP by adding gen AI as a critical, innovative component of our work together.
With such a wide array of leading tech providers in our ecosystem, we can give clients the best innovation across all dimensions of gen AI. All our solutions have been road-tested with clients across the globe.
The close relationship established with our strategic alliances and deep knowledge added by their solutions allow QuantumBlack to build and deploy at-scale sophisticated gen AI applications in an industrialized and secured way, including more than 150 large gen AI projects in the past months.
Our open ecosystem of alliances and acquisitions
The ecosystem will continuously expand, keeping up with the evolution of the technology. “As new tech becomes available, we welcome the opportunity to explore new collaborations. We constantly curate and update our portfolio of companies so that our clients have access to premier emerging technology,” says Alexander Sukharevsky, a senior partner who coleads QuantumBlack globally. “While each solution is tailored to the unique client situation, all are optimized for the highest levels of privacy, security, IP protection, and the responsible use of AI,” points out Alex Singla, a senior partner who coleads QuantumBlack globally. McKinsey is committed to helping our clients harness the potential of gen AI with clear principles and ethical guardrails for the responsible use of AI.
QuantumBlack is the orchestrator for your company’s gen AI journey. For more than 15 years, QuantumBlack has been a leader in developing AI technologies and IP, including gen AI, digital, and cloud. QuantumBlack’s teams work to develop leading client offerings, such as Horizon, a family of enterprise AI products that provide the foundations for organization-level AI adoption by addressing pain points across the AI development, deployment, and adoption life cycle. Kedro, QuantumBlack’s open-source code library for data and machine learning pipelines, has more than 13 million downloads. “McKinsey has 7,000 technologists, designers, and product managers serving clients in more than 50 countries. They range from specialists in infrastructure to experts in domain transformations, including all aspects of industries and functions,” says Alex Singla.
Many of our clients are evaluating the ever changing and dynamic space of gen AI and AI. “We have deep expertise and tap into our ecosystem to tailor the right solution to the right problem, customized to our clients’ unique context, including cost optimization, security, and responsible AI consideration and performance efficiencies,” say Ben Ellencweig and Alexander Sukharevsky. “It makes a strategic difference in a complex, fast-moving environment.”