Jacky Wright, Chief Technology and Platform Officer, McKinsey, clearly remembers the first time that she was inspired by technology and how it could drive process change. Working her way through college at a bank, she laid her hands on Lotus 1-2-3, the early spreadsheet killer application; “I got quite a reputation for my Lotus skills”, she recalls wryly.
The great juggernaut of technology, of course, has moved on; as has Wright’s career, which spans an impressive mixture of public and private sector leadership roles, including at supermajor BP (VP, CIO), the UK government’s HMRC (CDIO) and Microsoft (Chief Digital Officer.)
The vignette is a nice glimpse of the past and a passion for automation that Wright’s early experience engendered remains constant. It shows up, for example, in her advocacy of “Lilli”; McKinsey’s AI assistant that combines large and small language models to automate tasks across the company, including data collation for those at McKinsey used to manually working with, yes, spreadsheets, and which lets its consultants ask questions of the firm’s knowledge base and datasets in natural language.
Lilli: OpenAI + Cohere + proprietary tech
“We’ve processed all of the firm’s knowledge into vector stores by using OpenAI embedding models, with semantic and keyword search as well as LLM (OpenAI GPT-4o)-generated metadata to pull the best chunks of information for a user’s question” she explains. The firm uses Cohere’s re-ranker to “further refine the search results” and then runs the top results through proprietary filtering/relevancy check process.:
“Once the highest value chunks are identified we synthesize the final answer and include citations back the underlying source documents” she says in response to a later question. (The Stack will share more granular technical detail on McKinsey's chatbot in a future feature article...)
Sitting down to chat with The Stack on a visit to the consultancy’s London offices, Wright says the firm’s technology environment is now almost entirely in the cloud (a shift started under her predecessor).
McKinsey's gone all-in on the cloud
She explains that “around 400, 500 applications” are now in the cloud ("we're multicloud" she affirms) and that McKinsey shut down its last data centre in 2024. It’s been a “multi-year journey” she says, but “we’re really just driving it [forwards] so that we can get what we need, both from a productivity perspective, scalability perspective, cost perspective…”
Many a CIO or CTO has been lumbered with a predecessor’s lift-and-shift and their CFO with a resulting eye-watering bill. Is that the case here?
Wright says no. Pressed on this “cost perspective” for example, she’s candid that public cloud is “an education as it relates to expense… But I think the ability to be able to scale every aspect of what we do; create key partnerships with the hyperscalers in terms of what we want to develop, invest in, procure and go to market with; it sets us up very nicely.”
See also: A $300 million cloud bill triggered a rethink at this insurer- and a shopping spree on modular hardware
She adds: “I think the bigger challenge, which we've all had on the cloud journey, is how you train your teams to work very closely with your partners and understand the capabilities, the economics, the telemetry and make sure that we are using it and scaling as best we can.”
McKinsey has some 45,000 staff across 68 countries, and drives annual revenues of $16 billion from its 4,100 client: “From the C-suite to the front line, we partner with clients to help them innovate more sustainably, achieve lasting gains in performance, and build workforces that will thrive for this generation and the next” is how it describes itself; it is irrefutably a big player.
What the CTPO role entails...
Chief Technology and Platform Officer Jacky Wright says her role is twofold: “One is [being] the technology officer who is responsible for all of the technology that powers McKinsey, all of the technology that we use to enable our clients; and then all of the platforms that enable both of those things.”
A big current focus, she says, is ensuring the firm has “depth and breadth in engineering” including via McKinsey’s Engineering Academy as well as staying on top of the evolution of “infrastructure, service catalogues, a CMDB… the hygiene factor and making sure all of those other things are in place as well.”
Her customers are the traditional internal functions like finance, HR, procurement – fulfilling that BAU component of the senior IT role – as well as the consultants and partners who are demanding cutting edge tools to ensure that they can serve their customers faster, with improved digital capabilities.
“I’m Client 1 of [our own] transformation” she says, including McKinsey's “Rewired” playbook for generative AI-inspired productivity transformation.
The evolution of the technology CxO
That leading innovation component of the role is welcome, she says. Wright has seen first-hand how the C-Suite in the technology space has evolved.
“We were back office, keeping the lights on and making sure people could do what they needed to do; people only spoke to you when stuff went wrong; that’s way back. Now we’re at the thrust of driving new business models. Now we’re at the forefront of [facing business stakeholders and explaining] ‘hey, what does this really mean for us? We hear it’s disruptive. Help me understand how it's disrupting us, and what should we be doing?’” she adds to The Stack.
A CTPO, how does Wright find that boards’ understanding of technology has evolved over the years and what kind of conversations does she now have?
“What you find from a board discussion is that everybody wants to know ‘what do I need to know? What do I need to be afraid of? How can it help?’ versus ‘how much are you spending on your infrastructure?’ for example.”
AI? "A journey by doing"
Over the past year The Stack has had many conversations with CIOs and CTOs where, when the recording stops, many express concern about the level of pressure coming down to “use AI for everything” and unrealistic expectations surrounding that. What’s Wright’s view on this? “I think you have to characterize this as a journey in all aspects and a journey of learning by doing.
“Lilli, I think, has been successful, because what used to take an engagement manager, many hours,now has been reduced dramatically because the data is synthesized in a way with Lilli that really enables someone to engage with the client much faster than they did in the past. That success is still a journey.
“We still have a ways to go, but at least it's providing the ability for us to understand how we should be using Gen AI to be more agile and hopefully productive in our ability to serve our clients; to understand how we need to change our ways of working and the talent set required to do so…” she says.
On building cultural awareness...
Asked what she sees as her biggest success at McKinsey, Wright takes a moment to consider the question before responding: “Building cultural awareness around the implications of technology on our business.
“There are huge implications to our business model [from how technology is evolving]. Yes, we can talk about shutting down data centers. We can talk about all those things, but the biggest thing [needed] is cultural change…”
Driving change is never easy in large organisations and not always in small ones either. What are her tips on making change happen? “It’s not easy," she agrees emphatically. “It starts at the top and it is imperative that you understand the systems that make up a culture so that you change them to drive the right behaviors; then your outcomes have to be aligned around people, because only then can you really drive the change that's needed.”
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What does she mean by the systems that make up the culture, The Stack ventures? “How you’re rewarded; how you go to market; how you collaborate; governance processes; how you measure impact and value” she responds crisply and with what feels like a sudden burst of enthusiasm for that particular challenge or competency: “There's a whole plethora of of systems underpinning how how an organization or how a company works, and recognizing the levers that affect change and affect or inhibit change is key.”
Asked what one of those biggest “levers” is, she responds that “consensus building is probably the biggest one… Agility in any organisation [also grows from], knowing what your boundaries are… because then you know what you can and cannot do. I think clear communication on how decisions are made and should be made, is also an important part. So consensus building on the far end, and then democratizing and federating decisions on the other end.”
Where does the passion for driving cultural change from, we venture?
"I have a long way to go, because we have a long way to go"
“I'm a leader that likes a level of autonomy; of trust that I can do what I need to do. Giving [people] the right environment to thrive requires [giving them] some level of autonomy” Wright says. Asked about her personal experience of being given autonomy or otherwise as a black woman in technology, she adds simply that “it is my responsibility and my legacy to make sure I leave the world in a better place in all aspects of what I do, including diversity. As I think about where we've come from, we've made progress, albeit not as fast as anyone would want – and in some instances stepped backwards,” she adds.
There’s still major diversity paucity at the senior technology leadership level. Does it get exhausting having to be a flag-carrier for it, we venture? “It is exhausting,” she responds. “But if I don't get up every morning recognizing my role and responsibility and accountability. I can't create a halo effect, right? [I can’t] create contextual understanding that there are more people like me; we, too, can do what anyone else can do, and at the end, we're held to the same bar. So I still have a long way to go, because we have a long way to go.”
