I'm close with someone who is on the Digital side of McKinsey, and they said they attended some meeting where a partner was asked what he was excited about for the future, and he said something like "the opportunities from AI agents replacing software developers". The audience was a room full of McKinsey's software devs.
AI agents are more likely to replace associates at these firms than software devs lol.
AI agents can't do sql queries a lot of the time, but they sure can autofill the remainder of most excel sheets (and AI agents can't really autocomplete sql queries yet for some reason lol).
Yes, I use claude to code sometimes, but I use claude much more as an assistant to brainstorm tasks and mindmap than actually doing software engineering because vibe coding builds brittle projects. Whereas one-off decks are a perfect use case
Now replacing people that require a license or some other sort of credentials like lawyers, doctors or accountants... That is much harder.
That reminds me of a presentation the CEO of one of my former employers gave. Somebody asked why we weren't expanding into Europe and he said because it's harder to fire people there.
So? Everybody at McKinsey knows how the company earns its fees. Everybody there knows what they signed up for and it wasn't to help companies grow their opex costs. They knew it when execs were excited about "offshoring expensive domestic labor" 25 years ago.
This just proves to me that we do not actually have a meritocracy, because only a fucking moron would say that, in that environment, and a moron would not rise to the level of partner in a legitimate meritocratic environment.