Pushing telcos’ AI envelope on capital decisions

As telecommunications companies employ better AI and other analytics tools to increase the resolution of their view into customer satisfaction, they’re quickly reaching the point where they can be more precise about their capital allocations to efficiently expand and improve the network. By building on telcos’ recent advances in data…

What’s next for global banking

Banking has had a couple of very good years—the best, in fact, since the global financial crisis of 2007–09. Yet to some, the industry’s outlook seems less buoyant than recent profitability might suggest. On this episode of The McKinsey Podcast, McKinsey Senior Partners Klaus Dallerup and Pradip Patiath speak with McKinsey Global…

Brazil’s economy is stable, but consumers are feeling down

Brazil’s economic sentiment has taken a hit. Overall, consumers are more pessimistic about the state of Brazil’s economy than they were last year or even last quarter. At first glance, this shift seems counterintuitive given the country’s robust economic landscape. Unemployment has fallen to 6.2 percent, almost the lowest level…

Telecom emissions: How to tackle the biggest challenges

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:16 mins read

Telecommunication operators have set ambitious targets to decarbonize their emissions footprint, but so far most have gone after the low-hanging fruit. Some have made progress on emissions from their operations (Scope 1) and those from the energy they use (Scope 2). However, few have squarely taken on the much more…

Eight tech-forward imperatives for consumer CTOs in 2025

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:15 mins read

In 2024, chief technology officers (CTOs) at consumer companies grappled with the challenges—and embraced the opportunities—of the evolving technology landscape. Learning to use and extract value from AI, modernizing legacy tech systems, meeting ever higher consumer expectations, and complying with digital-trust legislation were all top of mind for these leaders.…

The critical role of strategic workforce planning in the age of AI

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:15 mins read

Forward-thinking organizations understand that talent management is a critical component of business success. S&P 500 companies that excel at maximizing their return on talent generate an astonishing 300 percent more revenue per employee compared with the median firm, McKinsey research shows. In many cases, these top performers are using strategic…

Tough trade-offs: How time and career choices shape the gender pay gap

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:12 mins read

At a glance Diverging work experience patterns drive a “work-experience pay gap” that makes up nearly 80 percent of the total gender pay gap, equal to 27 cents on the dollar among US professional workers. Women tend to build less human capital through work experience than men who start in…

Global Economics Intelligence executive summary, January 2025

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:10 mins read

President Donald Trump took office on January 20 amid a flurry of executive orders focusing on multiple issues—many with significant economic implications. Notable instructions signed off by the returning president include measures to deport illegal migrants, an “America First” trade policy, relaxation of energy- and climate-related policies, and various orders…

Food beyond sustenance: A conversation with Mars’ Shaid Shah

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:7 mins read

The world looks quite different from when Frank Mars started selling candy out of his Tacoma, Washington, kitchen in 1911. Today the family-owned business is driven by what consumers want and prioritize. The company’s Food & Nutrition segment is focused on making food that is not just tasty but also…

Smarter growth, lower risk: Rethinking how new factories are built

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:12 mins read

Today’s environment is giving US manufacturers even more reasons to reassess their footprint strategies. For some, localization of production may now seem increasingly attractive—particularly amid rising volatility in tariff and trade policy, evolving incentives for domestic manufacturing, and realigning global trade corridors (Exhibit 1). Manufacturers know, however, that building new factories—and…

Procurement 2025: Reimagining the function for success

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:5 mins read

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.How is the procurement function changing? Roman Belotserkovskiy: The role of the procurement organization and the position of procurement leader have been elevated to a much more visible and impactful position across most companies, in almost every industry. Jennifer Spaulding Schmidt: Right now…

When will we see mass adoption of gen AI?

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:20 mins read

Will generative AI live up to its hype? On this episode of At the Edge, tech visionaries Navin Chaddha, managing partner at Mayfield Fund; Kiran Prasad, CEO and cofounder of Big Basin Labs; and Naba Banerjee, McKinsey senior adviser and former director of trust and operations at Airbnb, join guest…

How to capture the next S-curve in commodity trading

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:33 mins read

After a period of exceptional profits, commodity trading markets are starting to normalize, causing industry-wide margins to stagnate or even recede. Our research shows commodity traders generated more than $100 billion EBIT in 2023, and 2024 earnings indicate industry value pools decreased by more than 30 percent year over year,…

Lessons from the Lighthouses

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:9 mins read

After six years, the Global Lighthouse Network (GLN) has expanded from 16 to 189 Lighthouses, representing factory, sustainability, and end-to-end value chain categories across 33 countries and 35 subsectors—four times greater than the number of subsectors in 2018 (Exhibit 1). The latest 36 Lighthouses—awarded in October 2024 and January 2025—have…

Why managing culture is critical for value creation in M&A

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:11 mins read

An organization’s culture—or the common set of behaviors, mindsets, and beliefs that shape how people work and interact—is a driving force for its success. In companies with strong cultures, employees at all levels understand the business’s mission and purpose, how decisions are made, how performance is measured, and individuals’ roles…

TotalEnergies’ tightrope transition: A talk with Patrick Pouyanné

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:19 mins read

Among oil and gas majors, TotalEnergies stands alone in its plans to shift a fifth of its business to renewable-led integrated power by 2030. It’s a tightrope walk for the company’s long-time CEO Patrick Pouyanné—essentially a strategy that’s not “enough oil and gas” for traditional investors nor “enough renewables” for…

Consumer goods: Seeking market expansion and growth

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:5 mins read

The industry overview The consumer-packaged-goods (CPG) industry has historically outperformed most other industries, thanks to high growth and consistent margins. But since 2012, the formula has broken down. Several factors, including inflation (which affects both consumer spending and corporate cost), market saturation, intense competition, changing consumer tastes and behaviors, and…

Dealmaking through challenges: Lessons from the automotive industry

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:14 mins read

There has always been an elemental symmetry to M&A: A seller concludes that a business or asset does not fit its enterprise portfolio, and a natural buyer recognizes that the same target is a strategic match. Put simply, there’s a buyer for every seller, or so the logic goes. However,…

Financial services: Dealmakers adapt to a shifting landscape

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:6 mins read

The industry overview M &A in the financial-services industry is recovering from the global slowdown of 2023. Monthly deal value in 2024 returned to the average monthly value of the prior five years, and total deal value for 2024 was 30 percent higher than that seen in 2023. Nine out…

The transformation imperative: Igniting value creation in medtech

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:16 mins read

The medtech sector continues to face challenges in achieving profitable growth, causing some companies to embark on bold transformations to unlock value. Value creation and potential efficiencies are difficult to capture because they are often deeply interconnected across functions, requiring an evolved operating model and cross-functional collaboration to unlock. Executing…

Digitale zorg in Nederland: Van evolutie naar revolutie

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:18 mins read

Zolang we niets doen aan verdere digitalisering van de zorg, stevent de Nederlandse samenleving af op een mogelijk onwerkbare situatie: De zorgkosten stijgen ieder jaar sneller en de personeelstekorten lopen in snel tempo op. Digitale zorg kan niet alleen de zorgkosten omlaag brengen en de personeelstekorten verminderen, maar ook de…

Improving military aircraft sustainment to strengthen Europe’s defense

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:13 mins read

In response to the changing geopolitical environment, European NATO countries have increased defense budgets, a significant share of which are expected to go to new equipment. As munition stocks grow and existing equipment ages, mission readiness—the ability to deploy military assets for their intended use—is an increasingly important priority for…

Rethinking your company’s clean-power strategy

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:12 mins read

Businesses increasingly want to buy clean electricity—especially as the fast expansion of data centers powering artificial intelligence pushes technology companies’ power demands to new heights. Unchecked, these increased power demands further threaten the world’s ability to meet climate targets. Whether to meet environmental, social, and governance (ESG) targets, cut costs, or…

CCS in Southeast Asia: An opportunity or distant reality?

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:14 mins read

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is projected to play a significant role in the world’s energy transition, particularly in hard-to-abate sectors. Based on McKinsey Energy Solutions’ analysis, future CCS demand is anticipated to be driven by sectors such as power, hydrogen, iron and steel, cement, and refining. The conditions in…

Faster, smarter trials: Modernizing biopharma’s R&D IT applications

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:14 mins read

Breakthroughs in scientific research and increased public and private investments have yet to negate the long timelines and rising costs of clinical trials. Such challenges continue to drag down biopharma R&D productivity and hold back innovative therapies from making it to market. Although clinical development speed increased during the COVID-19…

The state of demand for commercial real estate

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:9 mins read

It’s been a year and a half since McKinsey published Empty spaces and hybrid places: The pandemic’s lasting impact on real estate. The comprehensive report examined the effect the COVID-19 pandemic had on behaviors, including office attendance, residential moves from urban centers to the suburbs, and in-person versus online shopping.…

New demographic reality poses challenges for countries and companies

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:5 mins read

New research by my colleagues at the McKinsey Global Institute shows that as the world becomes youth-scarce, the number of people of working age per senior in advanced economies and China will halve, from about four today to just two by 2050. The fact that people are living longer is…

Building leaders from the ground up

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:21 mins read

CEOs are confronting double the number of critical issues today compared with ten years ago. On this episode of The McKinsey Podcast, McKinsey Senior Partners Daniel Pacthod and Kurt Strovink, along with McKinsey Senior Advisor Wyman Howard, join McKinsey Editorial Director Roberta Fusaro to discuss the characteristics today’s business leaders need…

Arnab Bose on AI’s impact on cybersecurity

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:14 mins read

In this episode of McKinsey on Building Products, McKinsey Partner Rikki Singh sits down with Arnab Bose, the chief product officer of the Okta Platform. During their conversation, Singh and Bose discuss how AI has changed the landscape of cybersecurity, how Okta innovatively protects its clients against deepfakes and phishing…

Returning to the office? Focus more on practices and less on the policy

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:21 mins read

The world of work is still in flux as many companies continue to follow hybrid and work-from-home models. At the same time, Fortune 500 companies such as Amazon, JP Morgan Chase, and Nike moved to mandated in-office policies of at least four days a week in 2024, and more organizations,…

What do US consumers want from e-commerce deliveries?

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:12 mins read

Consumers still love to shop online, but growth in e-commerce is no longer likely to be as frenzied as it was in recent years. E-commerce sales in the United States soared to 18 percent annual growth between 2019 and 2023. Our analysis suggests that sales could now normalize at a…

Global Private Markets Report 2025: Private equity emerging from the fog

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:27 mins read

To the casual observer, 2024 may have felt like yet another difficult year for private equity (PE) globally. Fundraising remained tough—down 24 percent year over year for traditional commingled vehicles, marking the third consecutive year of decline. Investment returns were muted, especially compared with buoyant public markets. Our analysis reveals…

Five ways B2B sales leaders can win with tech and AI

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:14 mins read

B2B sales leaders today stand at a crossroads. The environment they face is dynamic and challenging. Economic growth is uneven across the world, competition is evolving, and B2B customers are adopting many more consumer-like behaviors, seeking more robust buying experiences, and showing a willingness to find alternative vendors. How can…

Creating a modernized defense technology frontier

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:18 mins read

The defense ecosystem today is at a critical junction, ripe with opportunity for private capital, the traditional defense industrial base (DIB), and other commercial players such as hyperscalers to take critical roles in leading disruption within the innovation pipeline. Yet the window to reorient how public and private organizations invest…

How top performers use innovation to grow within and beyond the core

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:8 mins read

Innovation and growth are inherently linked. Companies that build new businesses and develop new offerings, processes, or business models are better able to capture growth opportunities and hedge against disruption in a highly uncertain business environment. This conclusion was forcefully reinforced in our recent survey of 1,039 companies around the…

How banks’ core technology might benefit from an ‘omnistack’

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:15 mins read

Core technology remains a huge challenge for the banking industry, with a majority of financial institutions still running on mainframe-based systems because switching to other options is such a monumental task. In this episode of Talking Banking Matters, McKinsey payments sector expert Roshan Varadarajan speaks with one of the entrepreneurial…

Investing in housing: Unlocking economic mobility for Black families and all Americans

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:49 mins read

At a glance Quality, affordable housing is out of reach for far too many Americans. This issue touches rural and urban households, young and old, poor and middle class, and households across racial groups. Housing, and where that housing is located, matters a lot. Housing significantly determines access to employment,…

The looming advisor shortage in US wealth management

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:20 mins read

Following several years of economic crosscurrents and fluctuating performance, the US wealth management industry is entering 2025 from a position of strength, with solid fundamentals in place. Demand for its services continues to grow as Americans become wealthier and their needs become more complex—for example, because of greater reliance on…

A new operating model for people management: More personal, more tech, more human

  • Post category:McKinsey & Company
  • Reading time:19 mins read

The way organizations manage their most important assets—their people—is ready for a fundamental transformation. New technologies, hybrid working practices, multigenerational workforces, heightened geopolitical risks, and other major disruptions are prompting leaders to rethink their methods for attracting, developing, and retaining employees. In the past year alone, for instance, we have…