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What makes us human? A question philosophers have wrestled with for centuries,

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McKinsey Wanted Humanity — It Hired A Robot

“What is the heart of this person? Who really is this person?”

That’s what Saleem Zafar, a partner at McKinsey’s Dallas office, wants to know about potential recruits, according to The Wall Street Journal.

How do they plan on finding out? Asking entry-level candidates to sit through a 10-minute conversation with AI pretending to be a client.

In all fairness, the AI isn’t actually grading the candidates. Human interviewers watch the exchange and evaluate how applicants handle the interaction. Which makes the whole thing even funnier: McKinsey is using a machine to stage a test of humanity, then having actual humans decide whether candidates can convincingly flaunt their humanness.

To be clear, consulting is a made-up field. Its biggest contribution to society is scarfing up graduates from top universities, paying them six-figure starting salaries, and setting them loose to spend their lives turning out pitch decks and memos. Meanwhile, the entire industry faces the possibility that AI swoops in and eats the work these firms charge so much to do.

The scary part is we’re at the point where companies are using AI to determine whether the people they hire have the qualities that differentiate them from bots in the first place.

Last I checked, Grok, Claude, and ChatGPT can build websites, hack into servers, and blackmail their own developers. I doubt putting together a pitch deck would be much of a lift.

So why don’t these consulting firms just hand all their work over to AI agents?

In short, human touch.

Understanding this, they asked themselves: how do you find people with said humanity?

Naturally, they concluded that having them talk to a robot would work.

Just a few weeks ago, on another corner of the internet, folks were getting worked up over one of the great questions of our time: Should you bring an iced coffee to a job interview? One recruiter thought the answer said something meaningful about Gen Z’s professionalism, and suddenly a plastic cup became a referendum on a generation’s work ethic.

So while we’re arguing over whether a plastic cup says something about someone’s industriousness, McKinsey is trying to figure out whether a chatbot can uncover someone’s soul … truly the state of our day.

But why stop there? If the goal is to eliminate human bias, as Zafar said, the next step should be an AI agent reviewing the interview between the applicant and the first AI and scoring how convincingly the candidate played human. Then another AI could review those scores, weigh the results, and make the final hiring decision.

Congratulations, we’ve found a way to make even humanity an efficiency problem for AI to solve.

The irony is thick when you consider the same firms building these elaborate systems to identify irreplaceable human qualities are staring down the barrel of a technology that could, with a few human-like advancements, automate much of the work they pay those humans to do.

The wolf isn’t at the door anymore. It’s sitting in their corner offices, selling executives on the efficiencies of eating their own workforce.

McKinsey knows its clients aren’t shelling out bags of cash to talk to a robot. But apparently, the firm thinks a bot is perfectly suited to finding the “heart” it wants in its employees.

If AI can make those pitch decks, crunch the numbers, and simulate client conversations, the question isn’t just whether a candidate has heart. It becomes a question of whether McKinsey will still value the humans it hires when replacing them becomes more profitable.

Spoiler warning: they won’t.

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