McKinsey Partners with Salesforce to Deliver on the Promise of AI-powered Growth

Sept. 8, 2023 — McKinsey and Salesforce have announced a new collaboration to accelerate the introduction of trusted generative AI for sales, marketing, commerce, and service.

This collaboration will bring together Salesforce customer relationship management (CRM) technologies, including Einstein and Data Cloud, with McKinsey’s proprietary AI and data models, assets, and capability building power. McKinsey and Salesforce will help companies bring together relevant structured and unstructured data to improve customer buying experiences, increase sales productivity, personalize digital marketing campaigns and reduce call resolution time.

Lareina Yee, Senior Partner, McKinsey & Company said: “Generative AI is a powerful catalyst for growth. But the promise of AI needs to be backed by built-for-growth technology and the operational muscle to fully realize the potential. Building on our strong alliance, we are collaborating with Salesforce on this critical front to bring our proprietary AI assets, data models and tech build/design capabilities to help our clients turn innovation into impact– all delivered together in Salesforce workflows.”

Clara Shih, CEO of Salesforce AI, said: “In today’s business landscape, adopting an AI-first approach rooted in trust and transparency isn’t a choice, but a necessity to succeed. Salesforce and McKinsey are coming together to empower every company with the strategies and technologies needed to fully leverage generative AI across their organization to engage with customers in personalized ways, unlock new opportunities and achieve growth.”

The era of generative AI is pushing the productivity frontier for economies and companies across all industry sectors, and especially marketing and sales. Recent McKinsey research estimates that generative AI has the potential to unlock $4.4 trillion global productivity over the next decades and has the potential to drive a 5-15 percent increase in total marketing spending and a 3-5 percent surge in sales productivity.

McKinsey’s research also shows that 40 percent of enterprises plan to invest in generative AI. This collaboration will help companies realize measurable results by deploying Salesforce and McKinsey software, data assets and an implementation methodology that focuses on building generative AI solutions that work at scale.

Salesforce and McKinsey’s collaboration creates a new end-to-end experience for companies that links a company’s business strategy to AI use cases. This is followed by McKinsey’s rapid solution design with a proof of concept, MVP build and the ability to test solutions with users to connect AI products and people systems for full scale roll out.

Our joint team of data scientists, solution architects, cloud engineers, UX designers and organization culture specialists will work side by side with company teams.

McKinsey and Salesforce know that companies want to move fast and that some prefer the flexibility of BYOL (“bring your own LLM”). Companies want to ensure tech investments deliver a measurable ROI and want simplicity – a platform to see relevant data, an easy way to ask questions and insightful data summaries and information to work faster and smarter. Together, Salesforce and McKinsey can help companies keep pace with the speed of market innovation and their own performance expectations.

McKinsey and Salesforce share a history of collaboration helping organizations accelerate digital transformations. This collaboration followed McKinsey’s 2022 acquisition of Salesforce Platinum Partner S4G Consulting and builds on McKinsey’s recent acquisitions enhancing its AI stack under QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey through Cloud provider, Candid, and scaling AI and Machine Learning Operations specialist Iguazio. This powerful combination allows McKinsey to bring together the strengths of its Salesforce experts, AI, and tech to help clients move from strategy all the way through implementation and impact.

About Salesforce

Salesforce empowers companies of every size and industry to connect with their customers in a whole new way through the power of AI + data + CRM. For more information about Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), visit: salesforce.com.

About McKinsey & Company

McKinsey & Company is a global management consulting firm committed to helping organizations create Change that Matters. In more than 130 cities and 65 countries, our teams help clients across the private, public, and social sectors shape bold strategies and transform the way they work, embed technology where it unlocks value, and build capabilities to sustain the change. Not just any change, but Change that Matters—for their organizations, their people, and in turn society at large.

Source: McKinsey