McKinsey Global Institute

Confidence 0.85 · 3 sources · last confirmed 2026-05-26

The McKinsey Global Institute is the business and economics research arm of McKinsey & Company. Founded 1990. Mission per its own framing: “to provide a fact base to aid decision making on the economic and business issues most critical to the world’s companies and policy leaders.” Editorially independent — “none of our work is commissioned or funded by any business, government, or other institution; we share our results publicly free of charge; and we are entirely funded by the partners of McKinsey” — but operationally + financially within the McKinsey partnership.

Role in the AI ecosystem

MGI is one of the wiki’s highest-source-reliability tier publishers on structural AI-and-economy questions — comparable to Stanford HAI (publisher of the AI Index) at the academic-institute altitude. Three properties make MGI publications load-bearing for the wiki:

1. Independence from client work: MGI publications are not commissioned by clients; they’re cross-firm research priorities set by the MGI directors-and-partners group.
2. Multi-author + academic-adviser sign-off: flagship reports are co-authored by 4-7+ MGI partners with named external academic advisers (Nobel laureates, deans of Tuck / LSE / Wharton).
3. Methodological transparency: technical appendices accompany major reports; methodologies are publicly documented (automation model, occupation taxonomies, economic value models, etc.).

Five research themes (current)

Per the MGI directors’ framing in Agents, Robots, and Us (Nov 2025):

1. Productivity and prosperity — creating and harnessing the world’s assets most productively.
2. Resources of the world — building, powering, and feeding the world sustainably.
3. Human potential — maximising and achieving the potential of human talent.
4. Global connections — exploring how flows of goods, services, people, capital, and ideas shape economies.
5. Technologies and markets of the future — discussing the next big arenas of value and competition.

Sources from MGI ingested into this wiki

Source	Theme	Date	Authors
Agents, Robots, and Us	Human potential + Productivity (workforce-skills layer)	Nov 2025	Yee, Madgavkar, Smit, Krivkovich, Chui, Ramirez, Castresana
The Race Takes Off in the Next Big Arenas of Competition	Technologies and markets of the future (industry layer)	Mar 2026	Russell, Bradley, Sastry, Chettih, Ellingrud, Goryunova
MGI Virtual Event: Race Takes Off	Same as above (event presentation of report)	May 2026	Ellingrud + Russell (panelists), Bradley (moderator), Gaffey + Sastry + Shenai (panel)

The two flagship reports (Race Takes Off + Agents, Robots, and Us) constitute MGI’s two-layer panorama on the AI-and-economy question — where will the value migrate (Race Takes Off, 18 arenas) × who and what will do the work that captures it (Agents, Robots, and Us, 7 archetypes + Skill Change Index). Same intellectual project, designed to be read in tandem.

Notable people (mentioned in this wiki)

MGI directors (per Nov 2025 acknowledgements; chair listed first):

• Sven Smit (MGI chairman; senior partner, Amsterdam office) — co-author of Agents, Robots, and Us. Promoted from dangling: 2nd-source author appearance.
• Chris Bradley (director; co-author of Race Takes Off).
• Kweilin Ellingrud (director; co-author of Race Takes Off).
• Sylvain Johansson (director).
• Nick Leung (director).
• Olivia White (director).
• Lareina Yee (director; senior partner, Bay Area; lead author of Agents, Robots, and Us).

MGI partners (per Nov 2025 acknowledgements):

• Mekala Krishnan.
• Anu Madgavkar (partner, New Jersey office; second author of Agents, Robots, and Us).
• Jan Mischke.
• Jeongmin Seong.

MGI senior fellows / engagement managers (per Nov 2025 acknowledgements):

• Maria Jesus Ramirez (senior fellow, Bay Area) — sixth author of Agents, Robots, and Us.
• Michael Chui (QuantumBlack senior fellow, Bay Area) — fifth author of Agents, Robots, and Us; widely-cited McKinsey AI thought leader.
• Alexis Krivkovich (senior partner, Bay Area) — fourth author of Agents, Robots, and Us.
• Diego Castresana (engagement manager, New York) — seventh author of Agents, Robots, and Us.

Academic advisers and named external contributors to MGI flagships:

• Sir Christopher Pissarides (Regius Professor of Economics, LSE; Nobel laureate Economics 2010) — MGI academic adviser, Agents, Robots, and Us.
• Matthew J. Slaughter (Paul Danos Dean, Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth) — MGI academic adviser, Agents, Robots, and Us.
• Luca Vendraminelli (postdoctoral researcher, Stanford Digital Economy Lab + Stanford HAI) — named research contributor, Agents, Robots, and Us.

MGI research methodology lineage (AI/automation strand)

MGI’s automation-and-adoption modelling stack — used in Agents, Robots, and Us — was first developed in 2017 (Manyika et al., A Future That Works, McKinsey 2017) and refreshed for each subsequent major report:

• 2017 baseline — BLS 800 occupations × O*NET 2,000 detailed work activities × 18 human capabilities; expert-survey current/future performance estimates; sigmoidal S-curve adoption modelling.
• June 2023 — The economic potential of generative AI: The next productivity frontier — added GenAI as a new capability layer; global potential ~$26T (untimed).
• November 2025 — Agents, Robots, and Us — refreshed BLS + O*NET + Lightcast data; new AI-expert capability survey; new Skill Change Index (SCI) computed via OpenAI GPT-4o for ~3.4M skill→DWA mappings with manual 1,000-cell validation; midpoint + early/late scenario brackets; $2.9T US / $28.7T global by 2030 (now timed).

The lineage is a useful indicator of MGI methodology continuity: the same BLS + O*NET substrate appears in three reports spanning eight years, with progressive additions (GenAI capability layer in 2023; Lightcast + GPT-4o skill-mapping in 2025).

Open questions

• Continuity of the MGI two-layer panorama: will the next flagship MGI report extend the AI-and-economy frame (technology layer, geopolitical layer, capital-flows layer), or pivot to a different theme cluster from MGI’s five research themes?
• MGI’s GenAI June 2023 paper (The economic potential of generative AI: The next productivity frontier) — cited as the theoretical prior for both 2025-2026 MGI reports’ economic-value modelling. Open ingest target.
• MGI’s 2017 baseline paper (Manyika et al., A Future That Works) — the foundational methodology paper for the automation-and-adoption model used throughout subsequent reports. Open ingest target.
• Relationship to QuantumBlack — Michael Chui is a QuantumBlack senior fellow on this Nov 2025 report; the boundary between QuantumBlack (McKinsey’s AI-and-analytics arm) and MGI deserves a body note when a QuantumBlack-specific source is ingested.