Global consulting firm McKinsey & Company currently has a workforce of more than 60,000. Of this, about 25,000 “employees” are AI agents working alongside the human headcount of more than 40,000. And according to CEO Bob Sternfels, this is just the beginning. The company now aims to enable every human employee with at least one AI agent to assist them at work and improve productivity.

Speaking recently at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Sternfels said the use of AI agents at the company has grown from a few thousand to nearly 25,000 in less than two years. And looking to the future, the company aims to equip every employee with at least one AI agent. In an episode of Harvard Business Review’s IdeaCast, Sternfels revealed that McKinsey has big plans when it comes to integrating artificial intelligence. He said that just one and a half years ago the company employed only a few thousand agents, but now this number has increased significantly. The company now expects that over the next year and a half, every employee will be “enabled by at least one or more agents.” This figure has also been confirmed by the company spokesperson to Business Insider.

To give some context, AI agents are not simple chatbots. They are autonomous systems that can solve problems, design workflows, perform tasks and deliver output with minimal human input. At McKinsey, the company has deployed these agents to conduct research, data analysis, document preparation, and support client deliverables that once relied heavily on junior consultants. And the reason for this is said to be efficiency and productivity.

Sternfels revealed that at McKinsey, this AI-led transformation is part of a “25-square” model. Under this model, the company is growing its customer-facing roles by about 25 percent, while cutting non-customer-facing jobs by about the same amount. AI agents have also helped the firm save 1.5 million hours in the past year by handling routine search and synthesis tasks. For example, Sternfels revealed that agents generated 2.5 million charts in just six months, freeing up advisors to focus on higher-value tasks like strategy development, client engagement, and decision making.

Although AI agents are proving to work as well as humans, Sternfels is clear that AI is not replacing people, at least not in the areas that matter most. He argues that humans maintain a decisive edge in three areas: setting aspirations, decision making, and actual creativity.

Yet it is hard to ignore the impact AI is having on jobs. McKinsey & Company has already seen its non-client-facing headcount reduced by nearly a quarter, even as output from those functions has increased by about 10 percent. At the same time, the appointment criteria are also changing.

However, with 25,000 AI agents now counted as part of its workforce, McKinsey joins other giants like Amazon that are actively pursuing AI in the name of efficiency and productivity, while gradually replacing parts of human labor with machine intelligence.