McKinsey has, for several years, collaborated with Parloa, an agentic AI platform that helps customer-centric enterprises build and manage AI agents for customer support and communication. Based on a proven track record of tangible client impact, McKinsey is pleased to formalize this alliance to help organizations deliver real-time, personalized, and autonomous service. To the alliance, McKinsey brings its deep service operations expertise, advanced agentic AI capabilities powered by QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey, and its extensive work across contact center transformation.
Many organizations across diverse sectors seeking to implement agentic transformations in their customer service and experience operations have run into similar challenges. Most initiatives remain stuck in pilot phases, where enterprise-wide adoption is hindered by legacy systems, fragmented data, and a lack of cross-functional collaboration.
In fact, as customer-facing digital channels scale, human-to-human interactions continue to grow 2 percent annually, often due to poorly designed digital experiences. The few organizations that have achieved a reduction of 10–15 percent or more year over year in their human interaction volumes have done so by solving data integration issues, disrupting process flows, and addressing risks that AI alone cannot overcome. It is expected that every customer touchpoint will be transformed by agentic AI in the next three to five years, moving beyond answering questions to real-time decision-making for refunds, upgrades, and contract changes.
“Contact centers that successfully transform—particularly regarding voice AI—will become powerful enablers of growth and customer satisfaction,” says Brian Blackader, a partner in McKinsey’s Düsseldorf office. “McKinsey has a strong capability in transforming customer experience with best-in-class AI platforms, and we are proud that our work with Parloa will strengthen this offer to clients.”
Parloa brings an agentic AI platform for building and managing millions of AI agents across customer touchpoints, including conversational AI across voice, chat, and proactive outreach channels. Parloa’s platform and approach help organizations shift from reactive customer support to proactive relationship management across sales, marketing, and service.
The alliance will integrate Parloa’s platform with McKinsey’s frameworks for navigating the human–AI balance to ensure organizations achieve true transformation that sticks. This includes helping businesses with data integration, process documentation, risk and governance, senior leadership alignment, cross-functional operating model design, and talent strategy.
“Our vision is for enterprises to move past pilots entirely,” says Chris Silver, chief revenue officer at Parloa. “McKinsey brings the readiness and organizational rigor to get there, and our platform puts AI agents to work across every customer touchpoint, at the scale a Fortune 100 enterprise actually needs.”
Our vision is for enterprises to move past pilots entirely. McKinsey brings the readiness and organizational rigor to get there, and our platform puts AI agents to work across every customer touchpoint, at the scale a Fortune 100 enterprise actually needs.
“We’re excited to deepen our collaboration with Parloa,” says Blackader. “It builds on our joint work helping companies reimagine customer experience from the ground up. Organizations that get data integration, operating model, and the human–AI balance right will unlock significant gains in both customer satisfaction and operational efficiency. This alliance gives our clients the opportunity to do exactly that.”
McKinsey believes that innovation thrives in collaboration. In addition to its collaboration with Parloa, the firm works with an array of leading technology and conversational AI providers in our ecosystem to bring clients the best innovation across all dimensions of AI.