Today, we are pleased to introduce a comprehensive suite of industry-focused AI products from QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey. These 20+ products and over 140 use cases combine advanced AI and machine learning techniques with domain-specific expertise to solve today’s most challenging business problems across a spectrum of industries, including Life Sciences, Retail, Mining, and Financial Services. They represent the very latest in AI capabilities and incorporate deep industry expertise, developed from almost a century of serving clients around the world.
Our R&D team, QuantumBlack Labs, with 200 software engineers, designers, product managers, and data scientists, has collaborated with over 1000 industry and functional practitioners, to build these AI products. They were developed using our Horizon platform, which incorporates best practices and risk guardrails for security, privacy and resilience.
“These products codify knowledge gained through on-the-ground consulting and transformation programs—thousands of projects over eight years. We have infused this insight into the latest AI models, software, and tooling,” says Matt Fitzpatrick, a McKinsey senior partner and global leader of QuantumBlack Labs. “Now clients can benefit from deep industry expertise in the form of leading-edge AI models, running on proven technology, along with the change management to ensure that new ways of working are adopted throughout the organization.”
These high-impact solutions can help organizations move quickly while building capabilities for long-term success. “We have invested significantly in developing a technology approach that allows these products be deployed in three distinct ways, to whatever our clients need,” says Rory Walsh, a distinguished engineer at QuantumBlack.
There are three deployment models available:
- Client managed—deployed directly to any existing IT infrastructure, local or cloud, and managed by client IT and AI teams
- Managed service—deployed to client IT infrastructure and managed by QuantumBlack
- Provided “As a Service”—a fully managed Enterprise solution provided by QuantumBlack
QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey
Metals & Mining
One of the core assets is OptimusAI, an industry-leading product for optimizing performance to transform plant productivity and decision-making in the production of materials, food, and energy. It incorporates our expertise in process manufacturing and applies cutting-edge machine learning techniques to unlock capacity, reduce emissions, and boost quality, and additionally offers configurable dashboards to improve industrial processes. A proprietary control-room advisor application was designed to optimize performance in the context of thousands of variables, presenting a straightforward user interface to offer optimization recommendations.
“Capturing value from artificial intelligence requires multiple skillsets, and at any point in time, our client engagements require similar toolkits,” says Alexander Sukharevsky, senior partner and global leader of QuantumBlack. “With QuantumBlack Labs, we created a center of excellence and learning that codifies domain knowledge into reusable assets that can be deployed into client environments and unlock new scales of impact. Today, this end-to-end AI tech and service stack, including 20+ products across data, infrastructure, tooling and sector-specific use cases, reduces time and cost to develop AI capabilities.”
Life Sciences
Our core Life Sciences product leverages AI and analytics to serve leading pharma and medtech clients. As new types of clinical and scientific datasets have become available, along with new generative and predictive models, and ever greater computing power to run them, the product has changed the research paradigm by embedding scientific AI into all the core processes. AI is a powerful lever to transform how Life Sciences can improve the probability of success and increase productivity.
QuantumBlack’s AI-powered transformations unlock order-of-magnitude acceleration in research and improved drug candidate efficiency, enabling new molecule entry into the clinic within 6 months of deploying our machine learning model for molecule design. Our goal is to accelerate the drug development timeline by one to two years, from discovering endpoints to gaining approval. QuantumBlack’s AI products are steered from within by practitioners with expertise in data science and deep domain knowledge of biological and clinical science.
“We recruit PhDs, doctors and practitioners in medicine who have been on the ground with patients and know the IT systems. They understand the nuances of data capture and of patient journeys,” explains Bhavik Shah, a McKinsey partner. “On the biological side, we have people who've generated and worked with the raw data in the lab and, so they know the value and the limitations which is really important in understanding the biases and gaps.”
Insurance
QuantumBlack’s work in insurance steers the delivery of AI use cases into transformation projects using reusable code components and use cases, built to production-grade standards for easier scaling. Client teams benefit through accelerated timelines, with pilots deployed in just a few weeks that deliver greater impact, through codified best practices and know how.
“We have been tirelessly iterating on the technical foundations of our industry solutions, which can create impact and transform any business, in any industry. Today is an exciting moment in the firm’s history,” says Matt. “We will always be a management consulting firm, but we’re also a technology company.”
To learn more about what QuantumBlack’s AI products can do for your enterprise and to request a demo, please e-mail Marc Solomon. You can subscribe to the New at McKinsey blog for updates to QuantumBlack Labs.