McKinsey and AWS expand existing collaboration to tackle the next horizon of cloud transformation

There’s a $1 trillion prize up for grabs today in cloud technology, and McKinsey and AWS have teamed up to help the boldest leaders secure a large share of it.

Building on a proven history of client impact, our organizations have now blended select Cloud by McKinsey offerings with AWS Professional Services, giving clients new ways to identify the right cloud transformation opportunities from day one—and deliver them at greater speed and scale than ever before.

“From day one, the essence of our collaboration with AWS has always been to help clients tackle their toughest business and technical problems through cloud transformations,” says Peter Dahlstrom, McKinsey senior partner and global head of Alliances and Acquisitions. “But over the last three years, it has proven to be so much more than that. Today, we’ve become true impact partners to our clients as we drive full end-to-end, cloud-enabled business transformations that build capabilities clients need to fuel resilience and drive growth.”

McKinsey and AWS first started working together to help organizations accelerate transformations through digital-native, disruptive capabilities enabled by cloud technology. Together, we help clients ‘innovate’—through advanced analytics, IoT, automation at scale, and more—and ‘rejuvenate’ by using cloud to lower traditional legacy IT costs and risks. By combining McKinsey’s expertise and impact approach with AWS’ growing cloud innovations and ‘learn by doing’ model, our relationship has already delivered impact in nearly 100 client engagements to date.

The collaboration is part of McKinsey’s open ecosystem of alliances and acquisitions and leverages the AWS Partner Network of more 100,000 members. Working together, McKinsey and AWS have helped a pharmaceutical company transform the patient experience by enabling remote triage through a virtual agent that is expected to handle more than one million calls annually. We also helped an automotive manufacturer consolidate real-time data from 30,000 locations in the supply chain, driving a 30 percent efficiency improvement by 2025 and $1 billion in anticipated supply-chain savings. And using Amazon SageMaker, we helped Emirates Team New Zealand successfully defend their America’s Cup title by creating a new sailor for their team: an AI training bot.

By introducing a new suite of joint offerings with AWS Professional Services, we have a new way to help our clients solve their toughest technical problems and build capabilities over time. Our new offerings include SpeedLab for Customer Experience and SpeedLab for Supply Chain. Additionally, Jumpstart Cloud helps organizations set up the right technical foundations and tools for rapid cloud adoption, and Jumpstart Mainframe helps organizations unlock business value when migrating from their legacy systems.

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“Our work at AWS is guided by our leadership principles, with customers at the core of everything we do. Combined with McKinsey's values and industry expertise this partnership presents an opportunity to raise the bar by bringing the best of AWS’ offerings and capabilities to customers. We are excited about the possibilities ahead in unlocking business value for our customers” said Al Opher, vice president, Worldwide Head of AWS Professional Services.

While the purpose of our collaboration remains the same—to help business leaders build the technology and capabilities they need to drive enduring change—we now bring in the deepest and broadest range experts in McKinsey and AWS to enable end-to-end execution from day one at greater scale.

“We are highly committed to our partnership with McKinsey and look forward to expanding across multiple industries to solve complex problems and drive significant business impact,” said Ruba Borno, vice president, Worldwide Channels & Alliances at AWS. “McKinsey’s expertise in key technologies and industry knowledge, coupled with AWS’ role as the leading cloud provider, is what customers are looking for to innovate and achieve their business ambitions.”

As the capabilities from McKinsey and AWS continue to grow—at pace and alongside the evolving needs of customers—we know we are only in the beginning stages of what will be a long, impactful, and enduring alliance.

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