Conversational AI has the potential to transform customer service and experience, enabling organizations to resolve customer requests faster, improve service quality and reduce cost-to-serve. But natural-sounding conversations alone are not enough. To deliver measurable impact, AI agents must also understand customer needs, navigate complex enterprise systems and reliably resolve requests.
McKinsey works with organizations globally to turn AI potential into measurable business impact combining deep industry expertise, enterprise transformation capabilities and the AI engineering expertise of QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey. The opportunity is to move faster from strategy to demonstrating value, building the case for broader adoption, embedding AI into core operations and scaling solutions to deliver lasting impact.
McKinsey and ElevenLabs today announce an alliance to help organizations rapidly prove the value of conversational AI through initial use cases, before scaling solutions across the enterprise. It combines McKinsey’s deep industry and enterprise transformation expertise, underpinned by the AI engineering capabilities of QuantumBlack, with ElevenLabs’ frontier conversational AI technology and agents platform. Together, these capabilities will help clients deploy and scale conversational AI faster whilst simultaneously delivering measurable business impact.
Customers may first interact with an AI agent through its voice, but building a lasting trust depends on the intelligence behind it. The real work lies in engineering agents that can understand and reason through a customer’s request, take action across enterprise systems, and continuously improve with every interaction. Together with ElevenLabs, McKinsey and QuantumBlack are helping clients advance this exciting capability at speed, while demonstrating value from the outset.
Customers may first interact with an AI agent through its voice, but building a lasting trust depends on the intelligence behind it. The real work lies in engineering agents that can understand and reason through a customer’s request, take action across enterprise systems, and continuously improve with every interaction. Together with ElevenLabs, McKinsey and QuantumBlack are helping clients advance this exciting capability at speed, while demonstrating value from the outset.
Ben Ellencweig
Senior PartnerMcKinsey
The alliance focuses on conversational agentic capabilities that can be adapted and scaled across multiple customer journeys at speed. Each deployment pairs multilingual conversational technology with the agent design, systems integration, and operating-model changes needed to deliver business impact quickly and at scale.
We’re partnering with McKinsey to combine our ElevenAgents platform with their enterprise transformation and industry expertise. We’re already seeing it work with KPN, the Dutch telecom company, which is using new AI-powered solutions to give their customers better and new services. Now we’re excited to bring the same approach to more clients, building agents that deliver real value from the first deployment onwards.
We’re partnering with McKinsey to combine our ElevenAgents platform with their enterprise transformation and industry expertise. We’re already seeing it work with KPN, the Dutch telecom company, which is using new AI-powered solutions to give their customers better and new services. Now we’re excited to bring the same approach to more clients, building agents that deliver real value from the first deployment onwards.
Mati Staniszewski
CEO and co-founder of ElevenLabs
From voice innovation to real-world impact at our clients
The opportunity in conversational AI extends beyond individual use cases to building reusable capabilities that can be adapted and scaled across customer journeys. The McKinsey and ElevenLabs alliance brings together frontier conversational AI technology, AI engineering and enterprise transformation expertise to help organisations move from initial deployments to broader adoption. Drawing on lessons from real-world implementations, the alliance aims to help clients accelerate deployment, continuously improve agent performance and deliver measurable business impact at scale.
We’re seeing this with a lot of our clients, for example at KPN, where we worked with ElevenLabs to bring intelligent agents into everyday customer interactions, from order enquiries to technical appointment management. We started by using a custom-built large language model framework to analyse anonymised call transcripts and chat interactions, helping us identify the most common customer needs and prioritise where AI could deliver the greatest value. This data-driven approach helped lay the foundation for building agentic capabilities that can be refined and scaled across customer journeys.One of the key lessons from our work at KPN is that deploying a natural-sounding voice bot is only the starting point. What matters is connecting agents to enterprise systems and workflows, continuously refining their behaviour and adapting voice models to local customer needs. That's how we can make interactions more natural and reliable, while enabling human colleagues to focus on more complex requests.
We’re seeing this with a lot of our clients, for example at KPN, where we worked with ElevenLabs to bring intelligent agents into everyday customer interactions, from order enquiries to technical appointment management. We started by using a custom-built large language model framework to analyse anonymised call transcripts and chat interactions, helping us identify the most common customer needs and prioritise where AI could deliver the greatest value. This data-driven approach helped lay the foundation for building agentic capabilities that can be refined and scaled across customer journeys.
One of the key lessons from our work at KPN is that deploying a natural-sounding voice bot is only the starting point. What matters is connecting agents to enterprise systems and workflows, continuously refining their behaviour and adapting voice models to local customer needs. That's how we can make interactions more natural and reliable, while enabling human colleagues to focus on more complex requests.
Ruben Schaubroeck
Senior Partner, McKinsey
Taking the model across industries: starting with insurance
The alliance’s ambitions extend beyond telecommunications to other service-intensive industries such as insurance. There, conversational agents can support claims intake, policy servicing, and everyday customer questions while enabling human teams to focus on more sensitive customer needs.
The goal is not simply to automate more conversations, but to make each interaction more effective - combining the natural experiences customers expect with the reliability, integration, and scale enterprises require.
McKinsey believes that innovation thrives in collaboration. The firm works with a broad ecosystem of leading technology and AI providers in addition to ElevenLabs to bring clients the best innovation across every dimension of AI.
