On stage in Las Vegas, McKinsey’s Bob Sternfels and General Catalyst’s Hemant Taneja joined Jason Calacanis to talk less about AI theory and more about what happens when it hits real org charts.
CES 2026 opened with its usual optimism about what technology can unlock, but one of the more grounded conversations came from a live taping of the All-In Podcast. Hosted by Jason Calacanis, founder and host of the podcast, the session featured Bob Sternfels, global managing partner at McKinsey & Company, and Hemant Taneja, CEO and managing director of General Catalyst. From the start, Calacanis set the tone, calling AI “the most important transformation of our lifetimes” and arguing that everything from PCs to mobile would be “dwarfed in comparison to the impact that AI is going to have on society.”
For Sternfels, the shift is already visible inside companies. “We’re moving at literally warp speed now,” he said. “It’s just night and day different.” He described CEOs less focused on abstract strategy than on execution, noting, “I haven’t met a CEO yet that isn’t talking about how do I get my organization moving faster. It’s quite frankly less about strategy. It’s more about organizational speed.”
That pressure is forcing uncomfortable structural changes. Sternfels described what he called a “25 squared” reality at McKinsey, where the firm is expanding its client-facing workforce while shrinking non-client-facing roles at the same time. “We saved 1.5m hours in search and synthesis last year,” he said, adding that the work did not disappear but shifted. “They’re moving up the stack and doing these more complicated problems.”
Advertisement
Taneja presented the same moment from an investor’s point of view, arguing that the old rhythm of education and career progression no longer holds. “This idea that we spend 22 years learning and then we spend 40 years working is a broken idea,” he said. In an AI-infused economy, learning becomes continuous, not front-loaded, and companies expect people to arrive with evidence of what they can already do.
That expectation is colliding with enterprise reality. Calacanis summed it up bluntly, describing CEOs torn between finance and technology leaders. “CFO is saying, ‘We spent all this money. Why do we need to be the fast adopter? I’m not seeing the ROI yet. Can we pause?’” he said. “CIO is saying, ‘Are you freaking crazy? This is the moment that if we don’t, we’ll be disrupted.’” Sternfels agreed the danger is getting stuck in what he called “pilot purgatory,” where experimentation never turns into redesign.
Taneja explained why General Catalyst has taken a more interventionist approach, including owning operating assets like healthcare systems. “It’s very hard for healthcare startups to go deploy successfully at scale,” he said. “So we’re going to go show how we’re going to actually go on the ground, do it with them, and show the world how it can transform the health system.” The goal, he added, is speed and proof, not theory.
The conversation repeatedly returned to what gets lost as AI absorbs early-career work. Sternfels warned about removing the bottom rungs of professional ladders. “If you don’t hire inbound folks, you can’t continually laterally bring in a CEO,” he said. “It’s literally like taking the bottom four rungs off the ladder to save money today.” His answer was not nostalgia but clarity about what humans still own: “Aspiration, human judgment and true creativity.”
As the session widened to physical AI, self-driving vehicles and robotics, the tone shifted from inevitability to constraint. Innovation is racing ahead, but manufacturing capacity, cost and labor shortages remain real limits. Robotics, Sternfels argued, will be essential to building resilient supply chains, even if adoption moves slower than software. “There’s no other way to do it,” he said.
By the end, the message felt less like a prediction and more like a warning. AI is already reshaping how companies hire, invest and organize themselves. The organizations that keep up will not be the ones talking loudest about the future, but the ones willing to rework how decisions get made and how work actually happens, now rather than later.
McKinsey & Company