Regulatory Consulting at McKinsey & Company

Overview

McKinsey pairs the reach of the world’s most influential strategy firm with a serious, DC-anchored public-sector practice, and AI now runs through both. Its dedicated AI arm, QuantumBlack (AI by McKinsey), leads the firm’s AI delivery and research; the McKinsey Global Institute and the annual State of AI survey shape the broader corporate and policy conversation; and the Center for Government Excellence focuses that capability on agencies. McKinsey’s influence on AI policy is less about publishing governance frameworks and more about sheer footprint: it is quietly rewiring how the largest agencies and Fortune 500 boards actually adopt AI, which makes its point of view on responsible deployment consequential by default. Its flagship research — the QuantumBlack ‘State of AI’ report — surveys nearly 1,500–2,000 organizations a year and has become a reference for the entire market, most recently documenting an ‘agentic divide’ in which a small vanguard of high performers rebuilds workflows around AI agents while the majority remain stuck in ‘pilot purgatory.’ For a policy audience, McKinsey’s value is its unmatched visibility into how AI adoption is really going across sectors and governments, and its role — via ventures like the OpenAI-linked ‘DeployCo’ lab-consulting joint venture — in shaping the delivery models that will govern enterprise and public-sector AI for years.

AI-Focused Regulatory Work

McKinsey’s AI-policy relevance is a function of scale and signal. Its QuantumBlack ‘State of AI 2025: Agents, Innovation, and Transformation’ report distilled a blunt finding from a survey of roughly 1,500–2,000 organizations: although nearly nine in ten now use AI, only about 6% qualify as ‘high performers’ capturing more than 5% EBIT impact, and most remain trapped between adoption and value. The report’s central insight — that value comes not from pilots but from redesigning end-to-end workflows, and that the biggest driver of EBIT impact is workflow redesign — has become shorthand across boardrooms and, increasingly, government transformation offices. That framing matters for policy because it reframes ‘responsible AI’ as inseparable from operating-model change: McKinsey’s data shows that in most organizations AI governance is owned jointly (often by the CEO, sometimes the board), and that the firms pulling ahead treat agents as a new operating system rather than a bolt-on. McKinsey applies the same lens to the public sector through its Center for Government Excellence and a growing body of work on how agencies can move beyond experimentation to rewire service delivery and ‘make every taxpayer dollar go further.’ The firm has also become a structural player in how AI consulting itself is repriced: its inclusion in the OpenAI ‘DeployCo’ joint venture signaled a shift toward outcome-based, lab-plus-consulting contracts that could reshape the fifty-year-old partnership model. For anyone tracking AI policy, McKinsey is less a governance advocate than a bellwether — what it measures and recommends tends to become the operating assumption of the institutions it advises, which is precisely why its responsible-AI posture carries weight.

Notable AI Policy Work

• Publishes the QuantumBlack ‘State of AI’ survey (annually, ~1,500–2,000 organizations) — the market-reference report tracking AI adoption, agentic AI, governance ownership, and the gap between adoption and value.
• Runs QuantumBlack (AI by McKinsey), the firm’s AI build-and-research arm led by global leader Alex Singla, plus the McKinsey Global Institute’s economic analysis of generative AI’s productivity and workforce impact.
• Applies AI to the public sector through the Center for Government Excellence, with published work on scaling AI in government beyond experimentation to rewire service delivery.
• Maintains public Responsible AI guidelines and helps clients build governance for agentic systems as part of workflow redesign.
• Entered the OpenAI-linked ‘DeployCo’ lab-consulting joint venture (with Bain and Capgemini), pushing the consulting model toward outcome-based AI contracts.

Thought Leadership

1. The State of AI in 2025: Agents, Innovation, and Transformation (QuantumBlack)
   McKinsey’s flagship annual AI survey; the 2025 edition documents the ‘agentic divide’ and finds only ~6% of organizations capture material EBIT impact from AI.
2. QuantumBlack — Artificial Intelligence Insights
   The hub for QuantumBlack’s latest thinking on responsible AI, MLOps, agentic AI, and public-sector AI value.
3. How Organizations Are Rewiring to Capture Value (State of AI)
   Companion analysis showing workflow redesign is the single biggest driver of EBIT impact from generative AI, and mapping how AI governance is owned inside organizations.
4. Generative AI in the Public Sector (QuantumBlack)
   McKinsey’s view on how agencies can move past experimentation to responsibly rewire service delivery and improve outcomes for residents.

Clients

Serves the largest federal agencies and Fortune 500 boards; public-sector AI work spans federal, state, and local government via the Center for Government Excellence, and international governments. QuantumBlack client cases include large-scale AI transformations at global enterprises (e.g., Deutsche Telekom and Aviva). Ecosystem ties include the OpenAI ‘DeployCo’ venture.