McKinsey's Jesko Perrey: India can leapfrog GenAI in multiple areas and be front runner globally

"I think the time for India is now. Given the DNA of Indian companies, you can actually leapfrog Gen AI in multiple areas and be a front runner for global development. Because there was a curiosity in the system. There is curiosity, a willingness to take risks and an affinity for investment when it comes to Indian companies.This makes me pretty positive for a very bright future for Gen AI driven marketing and sales in India, says Jesko Perrey, Senior Partner, McKinsey & Company.

Perrey discusses GenAI-led marketing and sales and how the functions can drive trillions of dollars in value for companies, Gen AI having the potential to unlock up to $1.2 trillion in value for the Marketing and Sales function, ethical concerns of Gen AI and whether AI can replace human creativity.

Edited excerpts:

Can you elaborate on some of the Gen AI led use cases in the marketing function in McKinsey?

At McKinsey, Gen AI led use cases work in marketing and sales, creative contents rule sets, channel sales, external coaching of support members, customer experience, personalized content across the entire journey of customer experience.

Marketing and sales is probably the biggest area of value creation potential in Gen AI. Our Global Institute has predicted that the potential value overall across all functions is 4.4 trillion. Out of that, 1.2 trillion is in marketing and sales which means it's more than 25% of all use cases and you find them everywhere in the marketing, sales and channel function.

It is important to understand the difference between AI and Gen AI. Gen AI creates new data, new content, new text, new visuals, new sound. Gen AI can be used for personalization in marketing and sales to create localized content. You can use it for product discovery journeys by simply coming up with new product ideas.

You can also come up with the next best sales opportunity. Gen AI will give a script to the sales agent and guide them on their area of focus.

OpenAI’s Sora has started to create a buzz. Then we already have ChatGPT and Bard. How are these playing out for McKinsey?

There is a difference between what we do versus what we do with and for our clients. For our clients, we are “provider agnostic”, meaning whether clients can work with ChatGPT 4.0 with a Microsoft solution or with a Google solution. It really depends on what's best for the client. We are not dogmatic; so you don’t have to work with OpenAI only at McKinsey. McKinsey has also introduced its own Gen AI system called Lilli. Our consultants work with a combination of Lilli and also open source depending on objectives and goals.

What are some of the key learnings and challenges that you guys came across while you were developing Lilli?

A former senior partner colleague told me years ago, probably the right tool in the wrong hand becomes a weapon. One of my key learnings has been to realize that it’s important that one knows how the ins and outs of AI and that they need to train the employees on the intricacies of AI as well. One also has to work and find the right data sources. It's very important, by the way also for Indian companies a huge challenge, can that be integrated in the legacy data? And then of course, IT technology systems.

You also have to ask yourself, what do you have to actually ask the system and what do you want to get out of it? It's also very important to make the employees understand what words to use.

What are your thoughts about AI replacing creativity?

I have been part of several creative juries for advertising awards and in my opinion, creativity comes with Gen AI. But it doesn't replace humans. It can replace humans for standard queries. So for example, when you do content creation for your website, you might come across something automated and standardized ; that's creativity coming through the system. In the long run, AI will run hand in hand with human beings leading to better use of let's say technology, tools, and assistance.

What trends can we expect to see in sales and marketing this year?

The question to ponder here on is how is India looking versus the globe? Analytical curiosity in India is really high. It's actually higher than in other countries. Therefore I don't think that in India, you will have that big debate of creativity gone because it's all driven by Gen AI. When you look at the leading scientists globally, many of them are actually Indian. So their analytics is very much in the DNA of India, which means that we can see in the next year significant productivity increase for sales and marketing functions, like sales, ops, the sales force, next level of personalization and improved quality of interactions with the customers.

But, we have to consider the challenges and subsequent solutions. Given that many Indian companies are still traditional and in the process of digitization, work needs to be done on the data, IT and Human Resources. Ultimately, India is driven by lots of fragmented trade which makes it difficult to digitize.

What do you have to say about the ethical concerns of Gen AI?

We need to work on and test and learn environments, to see what's actually working, what's actually not working, and to understand the do's and don'ts.. When it comes to the discussion on AI, I don't think ethics should dominate the theme. I would rather focus on the different use cases and understand where we can actually impact and where we can push the boundaries and face the risks.