McKinsey exec tells summer interns that learning to ask AI the right questions is the key to success

• Learning to ask AI the right questions is important for young consultants, McKinsey exec says.
• The McKinsey exec told one intern to learn to be a great 'prompt engineer.'

Standing out in a summer internship these days boils down to one thing — learning to talk to AI.

At least, that's the advice McKinsey's chief client officer, Liz Hilton Segel, gave one eager intern at the firm.

"My advice to her was to be an outstanding prompt engineer," Hilton Segel told The Wall Street Journal.

McKinsey is among a handful of top consulting firms capitalizing on the generative AI frenzy. Its record $16 billion in revenue last year came, in part, from new work relating to the technology.

The firm has also launched its own in-house generative AI tools, including Lilli, named after Lillian Dombrowski, the first woman employed by McKinsey in professional services.

Lilli's purpose is to aggregate the firm's knowledge and capabilities so that employees can spend more time engaging with clients, Erik Roth, a senior partner at McKinsey who oversaw Lili's development, said last year in a press release announcing the tool.

Tools like Lilli allow employees to cut down on busy work if they learn to prompt — the process of eliciting information from these tools — and focus their skills on higher-value tasks.

Roth said at the firm's media day last month that 72% of consultants now use Lilli.

"We've answered over 3 million prompts and add about 120,000 prompts per week," he said. "We are saving on average up to 30% of a consultants' time that they can reallocate to spend more time with their clients instead of spending more time analyzing things."