Today, McKinsey announced a strategic collaboration with Cohere, the leading developer of enterprise AI platforms and state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs). McKinsey and Cohere will harness the power of generative AI—the ability of machines to create and use human language—to drive clients’ business performance through tailored end-to-end solutions. The collaboration will be led by QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey, the firm’s industry-leading AI arm, with thousands of practitioners including data engineers, data scientists, product managers, designers, and software engineers.
McKinsey and Cohere will help organizations integrate generative AI into their operations, redefine business processes, train and upskill workforces, and use this emerging technology to tackle some of the toughest current challenges.
“Every client context, use case, and organization is unique, but they are all looking for the right generative AI solution tailored for their needs to address privacy, IP protection, and cost,” says Ben Ellencweig, a McKinsey senior partner and global leader of alliances and acquisitions for QuantumBlack. “Together with Cohere, we are excited to launch secure, enterprise-grade generative AI solutions for our clients, moving from discussing productivity and growth opportunities to capturing value on the ground, day to day.”
With headquarters in San Francisco and Toronto, and a key research center in London, Cohere employs hundreds of experts, including AI machine learning, and software engineers, as well as data scientists and researchers who have made formative contributions to the development of generative AI. Cofounded by Aidan Gomez, a Google Brain alum and coauthor of the seminal transformer research paper, Cohere describes itself as being “on a mission to transform enterprises and their products with AI to unlock a more intuitive way to generate, search, and summarize information than ever before.” One key element of Cohere’s approach is its focus on data protection, deploying its models inside enterprises’ secure data environment.
Creating value beyond the hype
“We are both independent and cloud-agnostic, meaning we are not beholden to any one tech company and empower enterprises to implement customized AI solutions on the cloud of their choosing, or even on-premises,” says Martin Kon, COO and president of Cohere. “Data privacy, data security, and customization are critical to creating strategic differentiation and real business value. McKinsey and Cohere share a vision of partnering closely with clients, using AI to transform businesses, and prioritizing responsible and data-secure implementation of this technology.”
Our conversations with CEOs have rapidly shifted from curiosity about generative AI to more practical considerations around how to use this technology to create value throughout their organizations
Models are only one part of the answer and together, the QuantumBlack and Cohere teams will:
- define generative AI use cases to accelerate business strategy
- design a completing IT architecture, such as generative AI stack, to integrate this technology
- develop and train AI models based on the client industry and specific context
- build employees’ capabilities using deep industry and domain expertise
- introduce organizational changes needed to gain value from this technology
- refresh the use case roadmap as this technology matures and client needs evolve
“Together with Cohere, we are excited to launch enterprise-grade generative AI solutions for our clients—moving from discussing the opportunities to capturing them in profit-and-loss statements,” says Alexander Sukharevsky, a senior partner and global leader at QuantumBlack. “We are already working side-by-side on reimagining business models and industries, gaining immediate productivity boosts, and launching digital and AI transformations to capture those at scale while managing risks and costs.”
Generative AI
Several companies have already started experiencing the benefits of the McKinsey collaboration with Cohere. Together, the teams are helping a financial-services group implement generative AI to manage routine customer feedback in more than 100 languages. The work will dramatically reduce customer wait times, freeing up representatives to manage more complex situations.
McKinsey and Cohere are also developing a generative AI solution to help a company improve its product development by bringing together product requirements and past designs to optimize the creation of future designs. The process will ensure that new product plans are fully informed by existing product specifications and insights, shortening time to market, and producing significant savings.
“Our conversations with CEOs have rapidly shifted from curiosity about generative AI to more practical considerations around how to use this technology to create value throughout their organizations,” said Alex Singla, a senior partner and global leader of QuantumBlack. “We’re thrilled to work with Cohere to help companies implement AI in a way that fits business priorities and risk tolerance.”
See more collaborations on McKinsey’s open ecosystem of acquisitions and alliances.