At McKinsey, innovation is part of our DNA. One way we bring that to life is through the Innovation Olympics—an annual competition that encourages teams across the firm to push boundaries, experiment boldly, and build tools that redefine how we serve clients.
First held in 1994 and redesigned five years ago to draw even more on the diversity and collective experience of the firm, the Innovation Olympics were developed to nurture creativity and entrepreneurial thinking across McKinsey. Over time, the competition itself has evolved—this year even featuring an AI agent as a non-voting judge, reflecting how we are using technology not only to drive innovation but to reshape how it happens.
“Innovation can come from anywhere,” says Erik Roth, a senior partner at McKinsey. “What we’ve learned over the years is we have an unbelievable marketplace of ideas. The Innovation Olympics allow us to focus that creativity by bringing our people together around truly distinctive concepts that we believe are going to change the way we serve clients and create positive impact.”
With over 2,000 participants from more than 120 offices, the Innovation Olympics are a global platform for developing ideas that advance client success, strengthen the firm’s capabilities, and address broader societal challenges. Supported by mentors, subject-matter experts, and coaching tools, participants progress through three rounds before presenting a final pitch to senior partners for funding and dedicated time to bring their ideas to life.
Becoming a finalist is a high bar in a year that saw more than 350 teams compete; each team had to not only demonstrate creativity and feasibility but also test their ideas with clients or external partners to validate real-world impact.
Judges this year also placed particular emphasis on distinctiveness, challenging teams to push their ideas further and differentiate them from existing solutions. Along the way, they discovered two teams with remarkably similar ambitions. The groups combined forces, creating a single, more powerful offering: McKinsey Intelligence – powered by AgentVerse. Their collaboration carried them all the way to the global finals in New York City—where six teams presented their ideas—and they emerged as the overall winners.
“When we entered the competition, we were not necessarily a big team with a big name,” says Iris Roelens, a project manager at QuantumBlack, McKinsey’s AI arm. “And yet, this competition really allows people with good ideas to surface them. If you have an impactful idea, you can make it come to life at the firm.”
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The idea for McKinsey Intelligence emerged from a real client challenge. While working on benchmarking models for clinical trial data analysis—a process that was precise but highly manual—Suryansh Soni, a senior data scientist at McKinsey, recognized that much of the workflow could be automated using AI. That insight led to the creation of the first multi-agent tool, which could replicate and improve the work with far greater precision and efficiency.
“That’s when the idea of AgentVerse was born,” says Suryansh, “and since then we’ve expanded our platform to include multiple different agents with diverse capabilities.”
Anyone can make their biggest and boldest ideas a reality at the firm.
McKinsey Intelligence – powered by AgentVerse combines the firm’s proprietary expertise with a modular, API-based architecture to deliver autonomous AI agents that embed intelligence directly into client workflows. These agents act as an always-on intelligence layer, helping organizations make faster, smarter decisions while sustaining value over time.
Already in use in the life sciences, manufacturing, and private equity industries, McKinsey Intelligence has been deployed in more than 15 client engagements within its first six months. In life sciences, its agents work under the direction of clients and help teams synthesize millions of publications, trials, and patents—delivering insights in minutes that once took weeks.
Of course, the journey wasn’t without challenges. Entering the Innovation Olympics without a finalized product pushed the team to think more boldly about how McKinsey Intelligence could be deployed and scaled effectively—all while keeping pace with rapid advances in AI and ensuring the solution could continue to evolve over time.
“The rate of innovation in the agent space is quite mind-blowing,” says John Law-Lund, a principal engineer at QuantumBlack. “It seems like new technologies appear on a weekly basis. Where we landed with McKinsey Intelligence plays to our strengths of bringing that deep domain expertise that our firm’s reputation is built on, while leveraging the best of modern tech solutions.”
As for what’s next, the team is focused on expanding the platform’s capabilities and deepening its impact across industries. As the global economy shifts toward agent-driven work, the team sees immense potential to build more sophisticated tools that can handle complex, cross-functional tasks and deliver greater value for clients—making expert agents a seamless part of McKinsey teams’ daily workflows to accelerate decision-making and scale expertise.
“Going into the competition, I had heard of the phrase ‘Build your own McKinsey,’ but hadn’t really thought much of it,” says Iris. “But this opportunity truly inspired me. I worked with new colleagues to bring an interesting idea to life. Our team proved themselves and truly proved that anyone can make their biggest and boldest ideas a reality at the firm. If you set your mind to something, you can achieve it here.”