How to get more value from your new tech? Five technologists weigh in

November 15, 2024 While McKinsey has almost a century of experience in management consulting, we are also a technology firm. We have 7,000 technologists, designers, and product managers serving clients in more than 50 countries. They range from specialists in AI, cloud and infrastructure to experts in domain transformations, including all aspects of industries and functions. This dual nature shapes our belief that it's Never just tech: that the right strategy, talent, processes, and culture also need to be in place for tech to deliver on its potential.

Five of our experts share what Never just tech means to them.

I work with designers and engineers to develop software that helps our clients' data science teams work at double or triple the speed. For example, with our Brix platform, developers can find and reuse existing code rather than reinventing it.

They can train and deliver AI models faster, across many different business units and geographies, and execute on the initiatives in their roadmap-realizing the potential of their AI investments more quickly.

We also contribute some of our products to the open-source community so they are publicly available, such as our industry-leading development tool, Kedro. Our open-source strategy is about helping our clients become truly independent because they can use Kedro in perpetuity, access the upgrades, and use the community-led support model for projects that live way beyond our engagement with them.

To me, the Never just tech approach means we come with our expertise, change management, portfolio of products, and capability building. It's all based on helping our clients truly transform-so they can carry on and create amazing new things-long after we've gone.

I help clients build capabilities and implement large-scale solutions for operating AI at scale. This involves deploying hundreds, if not thousands, of AI-enabled applications across their business units. For instance, we collaborated with a client to develop a new multi-tenant platform for real-time machine learning models. This platform ran multiple sites with over 10,000 events per second flowing to over 50 applications per site. It provided data validation, anomaly detection, event routing, and more-all integrated with robust data governance.

Despite the impressive technology, we cannot start there. It's Never just tech. We must integrate business and non-technical requirements, ensure value capture, improve skills, and determine the necessary change management so the technology is adopted. These fundamental questions must be addressed for every technology build. Interestingly, the more we did this, the more we realized we could use technology itself to assist with these non-technical aspects.

For every platform we deliver, we begin with a self-service portal for training and knowledge updates. It allows users to find reusable components and complete application patterns. The platform enforces process improvement by orchestrating best-in-class automation for application deployments, ensuring continuous enhancements, calibrated risk controls, and automated security checks.

With these functions managed by the platform, developers are freed from 80 to 90 percent of the routine work. They essentially gain "bionic arms," enabling them to move quickly onto more creative tasks and develop the next set of models. In essence, we are using tech to solve the Never just tech challenges.

The most exciting part about gen AI is that it can change the way people do their work. People clock in and clock out; they open Excel and their email, and interact with these applications. But when we build gen AI applications, we're trying to transform how that work world functions-automating manual tasks, integrating workflows, or creating a whole new set of insights that we didn't think possible.

We've been helping a legal firm automate some of its processes and working with lawyers and paralegals to translate their expertise into gen AI models. That entails understanding how they break down problems, the decision points, and the relevant legal regulations such as consumer rights. We "teach" the models by developing prompts, identifying and refining data sets, and presenting example images. It's rarely 100 percent correct and there needs to be a human in the loop checking the accuracy of the data. This is where Never just tech comes in: the tech on its own can never be built "for purpose" unless you have the end users and the right experts co-build and shape the solution.

What we do is almost ethnographic research. We need the UX experts, who understand the human and emotional aspects of work, to help people describe their thoughts as they complete tasks. Analytics translators match the tech and tools to the need; scientists and engineers build it; designers make it engaging; and lastly, industry experts ensure the best practices and guardrails are in place.

The benefit is you get a much more well-rounded solution, with valuable, exciting insights that are intuitive and more readily used. This drives an experience that "delights" end users.

Never just tech isn't something new. It goes back 12 years, when I first joined McKinsey as a software engineer. It describes our approach to technology implementations.

I recently served a major financial services institution. They had been attempting a digital transformation to update their core operations and customer experience, but were approaching it from a technology-only lens for years. We all agreed it was time for something different.

We established a digital innovation hub for developing new customer-facing applications, transforming their business, customer-first. We augmented their internal talent with external digital-native talent, changing the ways of working markedly with speed, agility and constant learning as they became change agents. We ultimately grew into a team of 200 and delivered five product launches in 20 months. Our clients could see not just the speed but also how excited their own people were to be working in such a cohesive and cross-functional unit, with all the skills needed to transform the business under one roof.

Our team included engineers from QuantumBlack and Leap; banking experts; agile coaches; McKinsey Academy colleagues for building capabilities; and an external tech partner to help with scaling. The team was not just cross-functional, it was cross cultural, from six different countries.

We worked side-by-side with our clients for months. It wasn't: "Let's redo an operating model and watch them succeed." It was: "Get your hands dirty. Get into the details. Solving for a production launch at 6 AM and truly living a client's business as if it was our own." That kind of experience is what Never just tech means to me.

The Never just tech approach is something that really excites me-it is the foundation of how we serve clients: every digital project is about people, process, and tech. Recently, we developed an enterprise-level bill payment app. We leveraged modern, cloud-based technologies with cutting-edge technical stacks and developed the application code for customers, all while using modern deployment and data management strategies. That's the tech.

In terms of "people," the project partnered all of the tech people, from department leads to entry-level engineers, with their business counterparts, so together they were creating solutions that the business needs and customers want.

In terms of "processes," we created a framework that helped the team integrate customer feedback every time they developed new features, as well as a skills roadmap to guide their technical, business, and communication capabilities. These were some of the ways we could make sure that the workflows were in place, and they would keep growing-and train and integrate new people-even after we leave.

The hardest part of any project? Saying goodbye to the clients I had been working with for months. You develop great relationships and it's exciting and inspiring to watch each of their growth journeys.

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