What AI Changes (and What It Doesn't) at Bain

Speaker A: Foreign.

Speaker B: Welcome to beyond the Bio, a podcast that dives deep into the background of the exceptional leaders at Bain and spotlights the incredible work that they're doing. Today we're kicking off a new series focused on AI and talent. We'll touch on topics you'd be curious about, including how we're using AI to support our clients across industries, how it's impacting our hiring, and how we're using our expertise in this space inside and outside of Bain. To kick off the series, we're joined by America's regional managing partner, Tamar Durnur. Uh, we'll talk about her extensive Bain career and how AI is impacting the work we're doing with our clients. We'll also talk about how we think about hiring our next generation of talent, which will be the main focus of another upcoming episode. Tamar, thanks for joining us today.

Speaker A: I am thrilled to be here.

Speaker B: I can't believe we haven't done this yet.

Speaker A: I can. I think a lot of people thought it wouldn't be a good idea to record what you and I usually do.

Speaker B: Exactly. That's a good point. I want to start by how we always start by giving people a sense of who they're listening to and maybe just talk a little bit about your background. Can you tell us a little bit about where you grew up and how that shaped your path into college and into your career?

Speaker A: Yeah. I'll tell you two things about my background which I think ended up being important. One in a sort of non intuitive way, which is my family are not business people. Uh, like, broadly speaking, they do not participate in business. They are exceptionally academic. In fact, my dad, who made documentaries for PBS and the BBC, was the sellout. He was the one who had taken, like, the commercial path. Everyone else either, you know, is a professor or writes fiction. And I think the assumption was that that was the path I would go on. But business was always the road not taken for my dad. And I think he was curious about it for himself and I think he was curious about it for me. And one of the things which none of us could have anticipated, but which I take as a, as a blessing, is that when I was little and we drove in the car, my dad essentially gave us case interviews. That was what we did in the car. And so when I did show up for my first vain interview, I was like, this is the most comfortable thing in the world. Right. You want me to try to think about the underlying rules of this business? Yeah, that's what we DO on Route 9. So that's one piece, which is not a business family, sort of an academic family, but this thread from my dad, which I think ended up pulling through. And then the other thing I think important about my background or the way I grew up is I grew up in a lot of places. I grew up in Jerusalem and Paris and Boston. And I think always was sort of encouraged to believe and believed about myself that I was a citizen of the world and that that was something I was going to keep being for the rest of my life. And I think that was an important part of Bain for me. That's been an important part of Bain for me.

Speaker B: Yeah, we're certainly going to talk about that as we talk about your journey inside Bain. But you go through that upbringing doing case interviews on family road trips, and it's time for you to leave for college. Where were you when you left for college, and where did you end up going?

Speaker A: So I went to Northwestern, where I majored in European intellectual history, essentially in the history of philosophy, which is possibly the only way you can make philosophy less practical or less useful. But, uh, you know what? I'll tell you, I loved reading. I loved reading those writers, and I still do. So I don't regret it for a minute. I do think those are the big, important questions, and I still spend time on them. Just more, more extracurricularly. And then I started a PhD and the same topic. I was pretty focused on Kierkegaard. Again, super, super lucrative. I don't get a lot of questions about that at work now. Kierkegaard and his relationship with the existentialists. And I did the first year of that PhD program, for which you receive in the liberal arts, a consolation Master's. That's the only master's I've got. I never went to business school. And then I dropped out of my PhD program and joined Bain.

Speaker B: So it is interesting because the common thread between what your path was and most people at Bain is that you have some kind of passion and you just go all in on it, regardless. To hell with everything else. This is what I'm interested in. This is what I'm doing. And it sounds like you did that until you didn't, and then you decided to come to Bain. How did that come about? And what was your introduction to Bain? Because we started roughly the same time, so consulting was kind of a big thing, but not. Not what it is today for undergrads. Especially undergrads that weren't in business.

Speaker A: Yeah. Absolutely not. Look, I wish, and I know the folks listening to this will have been rigorous and thoughtful and comprehensive. I was none of those things. I, like, tripped and fell and found a job that suited me down to the ground. So mostly I just count my lucky stars. But I did the Bain interview for two reasons. One, because all of my roommates wanted to do it and I am, like the rest of us, a little competitive. And two, because my dad was interested in me doing it and I always looked for easy ways to make him happy. I guess I'd say two things about it. One is that, uh, not surprisingly, I loved the case interview. That was, that was such a comfortable, happy place for me. And at the time, the other job that I was considering was being a fact checker at the New Yorker. And the interview for being a fact checker at the New Yorker is fact checking. Are we allowed to swear on this podcast?

Speaker B: I think we're going to need to.

Speaker A: It's boring as fuck, Keith. That's what I need you to know. And, ah, the case interviews I loved one. I loved the people I interviewed with. So my second round interviewer in Boston was Torrance Boone. Do you remember Torrence?

Speaker B: I remember Torrance. Good dude.

Speaker A: Okay, so for those of you who don't remember Torrance, Torrance was a black, gay, former backup dancer for Paula Abdul. He was exceptional. And you just couldn't, you couldn't be in his presence and not feel like shit. If this guy can be his authentic self at Bain, I probably can be too. So there were a lot of things I liked about the recruiting process. I would say that I still came into Bain assuming that I would leave in pretty short order, that I would check it out, that it would be this exotic anthropological expedition where I saw business people in their natural habitat, in their khakis. And then I would leave to go know, participate in the world the way I had already imagined. But I loved it. In spite of myself, in spite of being so certain that I was not a typical beanie and that I was not destined for a career in a suit, which is what we wore back then.

Speaker B: Back then. Yep.

Speaker A: I loved it pretty much from the jump. I loved the people. It was the best people chooser I had ever been a part of. And as someone who had always prioritized doing things that were interesting and doing things that were hard. The work was interesting and hard and big. You know, like the problems were interesting and hard. And then the part of the problem that was assigned to me, you know, even though, uh, I was a 21 year old Kierkegaard expert, is probably a strong Word. Those were also interesting hard problems. And I tried to be cool about it. I was always, if you asked me, six months away from leaving. But, you know, I've been six months away from leaving for 27 years. And that's just a, uh, hopefully that's just an indication of how high a standard I have for keeping it interesting.

Speaker B: Now, Tamar, you mentioned earlier that you didn't go back for business school, but you also mentioned you were a citizen of the world. And in some ways, when you talk about saying this was a great people chooser, people place you, you can say that with a perspective that many of us haven't. Because you've actually bounced around the system a lot.

Speaker A: Yes. Right. I mean, in the context of this being my only job ever, I have done it lots of different ways. So I started out in Boston. I did longer term transfers to San Francisco and New York and Stockholm. I did shorter term or sort of case related transfers to London and to Mexico City, really Guadalajara. That sort of described my first 10 years at Bain. I, uh, looked for every opportunity to travel. I looked for opportunities to travel internationally. I also traveled all over the US I was picking my cases based on where I got to go. And then I had kids and I had a completely different attitude then. I was literally drawing a radius around Boston. It was a radius that was big enough to include New York because I could get in and out of it in a day. But the priority was being at home with my boys.

Speaker B: Tamar, I have to ask because some people considering Bain immediately go, well, yeah, but I don't want to get an mba. Did you feel pressure to go back and get an MBA from the firm? I know we started around the same time. I think I came out of business school about the time we were getting promoted. At the same time after that, did you feel like you needed to go back? Did you not want to go back? Did you think about it?

Speaker A: I thought about it a lot. I asked a lot of people what they thought. What I learned from asking others was that if they went to business school, they thought I should go to business school, and if they didn't go to business school, they thought I shouldn't go to business school. And what I took away from that was, whatever happens, I'm, um, unlikely to have regrets. I wouldn't say, you know, I wouldn't say that Bain put any pressure on me. I think a little bit. I don't know if Bain understood me. It was the opposite. Because a lot of people would be like, everybody goes to business School, you shouldn't really go to business school. And. And I was sort of like, D double dog dare me not to.

Speaker B: Let's see. Let's see how this works out.

Speaker A: I'll do that all day long. So, you know, that for sure was part of it. But part of it was I was having a blast. I was learning so much, and I was a kid who had loved school, and yet this was the richest educational environment I had ever been in. Uh, like I was drinking from the fire hose every day, and it was hard for me to imagine that I was gonna go sit in a classroom and learn more than I was currently learning. And it was. When would we have gone? It was like 2001.

Speaker B: Yeah, you would have gone in 2001. 2002. Right after the downturn.

Speaker A: Yeah, right after the downturn. I think I felt like I had been through the hard part with Bane and Bain had come through. I felt like things were picking up. I felt like what was going on felt a technology perspective was fascinating and I wanted to be in it. I wanted to be doing it. And so for a whole bunch of reasons, I didn't go back to business school.

Speaker B: Yeah. And speaking of being in it, uh, you ended up focusing on a pretty hardcore analytics part of the business. Way before advance, way before advanced analytics and AI was a thing. And definitely nobody had that on their bingo card looking at your CV on the way in.

Speaker A: No, they did not. I think it's really interesting, but I think it's one of the things that was the part of this lucky fit with Bain, which is I really, really like topics that get at human behavior and psychology. Like, I really do like anthropology on some level, but I really like to do those topics in hardcore ways. So not just to speculate about it, but analyze and quantify and denominate. And so, you know, my favorite cases at Bain and the ones that I eventually sort of moved towards all the time were the ones that, where I got to do both of those things. So in certain industries and sectors like apparel and hospitality, travel and leisure, you have humans making decisions that are about their identity. That's a lot of how people choose the clothes they wear and the trips they go on as this sort of a expression of self identity. Well, shit. Trying to figure out how big the opportunities are. If that's the kind of human impulse you're trying to cater to or less generously exploit. That's fun. I. I mean, that's like the combination of psychology and hard science. And I loved that. And you could say, like But, Tamara, did you have the analytic background coming in? No. No, I did not have it. But did I have it? You know, did I have it two years in and did I learn for the last 27 years? Yeah. And again, like I said, I don't think I could have learned faster in a different way. Doing it was learning.

Speaker B: Tamar, I want to round out a little bit of your story at Bain by just touching quickly on a couple of leadership positions you've had, because you, uh, obviously were successful on the client side of the business, but then, like many of our guests, moved into servant leadership roles. You been an office head, you've been on Bain's board of directors, and now you're leading our largest region as our regional managing partner for the Americas. What led you down that path at the firm? Is it just a new challenge and a new type of analytics or some other passion to sort of lead internally as a servant to the partnership and the rest of the firm?

Speaker A: Again, I fear this will disappoint the more logically minded members of your audience, because what you're learning is that a lot of the decisions I make about my career are not as, ah, scientific as the ones I would make for my clients. You know, I. I think I took the Boston office head job for two reasons. One was that my dad had just died. And I think that on some level, I was just shaking up the universe because I felt I couldn't. It couldn't just be that I sort of went on doing the same things I had been doing when he was such a big part of my life, when he was no longer. When he was no longer there. So I think it was a, uh, sort of a. A move of desperate grief in some ways. And I think the other reason I did it was that I was so, so honored to be asked and that I looked at the. That's not a good reason to do things. I do not recommend this as a reason to do things, but it's the truth. I looked at the people who had been boss and office head, and they had meant a great deal to me personally. They had taken care of me. You know, even the previous office head, Kara, who probably has been on the podcast, when my dad was dying, she was the one who said, you know, as I was like, I think I need to take a little bit of time off. She was the one who said, no, take all the time off. Go be with your dad. We'll take care of things until you get back. So those people were impressive, exceptional, and the only way to Sort of return those favors is to pay it forward. So that there was certainly some of that for me, too. In many ways, it wasn't a natural role for me. Or I thought it wasn't a natural role for me. I thought it wasn't a natural role for me for two reasons. The first is I like to heckle from the back row.

Speaker B: There's no back row when you're the office head.

Speaker A: Keith is like, yes, I am aware.

Speaker B: I, um, know

Speaker A: I like to heckle from the back row, and. And that was a big, hard transition for me, but I'm super glad that I made it. You know, I like to heckle from the back row, but you can get a lot more done from the front of the room. So I'm grateful that I was forced into. Not forced, but sort of against my instincts, maybe moved to the front of the room. And then the other thing, which was a revelation at the time, was that I was. I considered myself a strategist. And I didn't say it, but the unspoken ellipses was, you know, because operations is for lesser folks. But if you want to slap me, that's fine. I want to slap me, too, because, uh, as it turns out, I am an operator. I am so much more comfortable and so much more happy in operating roles. I, uh, like my hands on the wheel. I like my feet on the pedals. And that's something I think I might never have learned had I not in the throes of grief or whatever else, decided to take on the Boston office head role.

Speaker B: Tamar, how did you parlay or get asked to go from the office head role to joining the board of directors? Which is always this weird thing because the board sort of manages the operators, but then the operators are usually the office heads and other leaders for the people that are on the board. Uh, how do you make that transition?

Speaker A: So, uh, look, as far as how I was asked to join the board, that's someone else's mistake. You'll have to ask them. It is a sort of weird board, right? It's not an independent board, and it does have these circular references built into it. And I would say in any lesser organization, that would be a problem and in vain. It's just an idiosyncratic source of excellence. My favorite part of the board role and the. Honestly, uh, one of the things that I am most proud of at Bain was that I played a role along with Gary Turner, and in founding our risk function, which I'd call it affectionately, the Committee of what We Will Not do and in the, uh, context of the last 10 years in our industry, that is just an incredibly important committee.

Speaker B: I completely agree. And I've known Gary because When I started 30 years ago, he was a partner in the Chicago office before he. Before he went down under. Now you do the board work, and you would think that, like, this is cool, this is the role you can ride off into the sunset, and instead you take on the front of the bigger room, which is the America's regional managing partner role. So now you're not just an office head.

Speaker A: How old do you think I am? Like, when did you think this was coming?

Speaker B: I mean, let me put it this way. You could have ridden that for a long time and been very happy solving really big problems. And you said, you know what? I think I see a bigger challenge. Let me go do that. And it's interesting you alluded to it, but at Bain, it really is. You know, the partners and the firm sort of taps you for something because they think you'd be a good leader. It's not like you're elected. It's not like there's Hunger Games and the Last Person Standing. It really is kind of an honor to be asked to take on these servant leadership roles by your peers. Um, and you took on a pretty big one.

Speaker A: No, it is. And I think, you know, one of the weird things about Bain is that you are almost certainly giving a vibe that you're not sure you want the role.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: If you are being. If you were being asked to do it because that servant leadership, it's not for you. It's not about you. It's in service of. It's in service of the partners and the teams. And I was maybe a little bit more sophisticated in my thinking about the America's role than I was around the office head role. I knew better what it would mean, I think. And I wasn't. I, uh, wasn't navigating my own psychology. What I think what I felt was there was going to be no better, more powerful way for me to both make sure that the Bain experience that I had was available to the next generation of Beanies, because it's been awesome. And also make sure that that experience moved into the future, stayed ahead, uh, stayed competitive, stayed exceptional. And I'm almost years in, uh, now to America's role, and I love it. It's my favorite. But you know what? They've all been my favorite.

Speaker B: Tamar, I want to keep with what the team put us together to talk about, at least for a few minutes here. Although I feel like we could catch up for an hour and not get to AI at all. But let's talk about AI and at a high level, for those who may not be familiar, you know, what type of AI challenges is Bain helping its clients solve right now? What are you seeing from where you sit?

Speaker A: What I'd say is there are for sure AI related challenges that we are working with clients on right now. But also there isn't a topic right now that our clients are bringing to us that doesn't have an AI component. I'm saying that out loud and being like, well, that's probably a statement someone could challenge me on, but honestly, like, try. There isn't. You know, if you're talking about customer segmentation, you're, you're talking about AI. If you're talking about supply chain, you're talking about AI. If you'RE talking about any element of Org at this point, you better be talking about AI. So it's not, you know, there are a set of questions which are, where AI is at the headline level, Help us design the platforms and data fabric that we're going to need to exploit AI. But then there's the fact that every other business problem that we're working on is one that now requires you to be thinking in that way and using those tools.

Speaker B: And I remember in the early 2000s, I had a couple of clients who weren't really sure about the whole website thing. You know, I don't know that we're going to need a website. I don't know that people ever buy our product online. And you're like, I don't know about that. The clients that aren't thinking about AI, uh, probably aren't the long term clients we want to invest in anyway, because they may not be here long term.

Speaker A: And look, there are, uh, as with anything, there are sectors of the economy that have to move faster, and there are sectors of the economy that have a little bit more latitude, a little bit more latitude to move slower just because of the ways that the sort of relevant technology affects their business model and competitive position. But this is for sure a more unilateral disruption and revolution than you and I have ever seen. And yeah, we looked through the Internet. That was not nothing.

Speaker B: That was not nothing. When you sit where you are, do you see us embedding AI into all of our practice areas and all of our capabilities? Like people who say, you know, I really want to do AI, which practice should I join? The answer is pretty much all of them.

Speaker A: Bane. Yeah, like again, I'M I searching myself every time I make such a unilateral statement to be like, could it be challenged? But I don't think it can. There just isn't a space right now that isn't affected by this. You know, you can take, you might think to yourself, software is obviously rapidly and deeply impacted in this moment, but I'll tell you, so is mining and so is basically all elements of manufacturing. And there just isn't a spot that isn't impacted in some way.

Speaker B: How have you seen that change? You were in the retail practice, I believe. How have you seen that change? Just a, ah, practice that might be a little closer to home for you.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's funny, I was thinking about this the other day as I was looking over, looking over some work for one of my current clients who I've served since 2008, if you can believe it. And I was thinking specifically about consumer research, which is the piece like I talked about that has always fascinated me. And if you think about the change that has happened over the course of my time at Bain and in, in retail, when I started doing surveys in 1999, we were cold calling individuals, right? And it would take you two weeks to talk to uh, 500 people and, and you would go through a fairly simplistic survey because they couldn't see what you were talking about. So you couldn't have 10 multiple choice answers, you couldn't have complicated conditional responses, none of that. Uh, and then maybe 10 years later we could do an online survey augmented by phone so that we didn't have a misrepresented sample and we could talk to maybe 2,000 people in a week. And now you can program a survey and talk to tens of thousands of people in 48 hours if you are so inclined. It could be 10,000, it could be 20,000. It doesn't really matter from the way this process has scaled and now, and this is I think, the next thing, and where AI enters the picture. Now you can use the data you do have to create a synthetic customer and you can pose questions you've never asked to that synthetic customer and you will find that those answers are statistically sound. So just think about that stretch of evolution and revolution in gathering proprietary customer insight. It's awesome. Not jazzed by that. Maybe this is not for you.

Speaker B: It really is. And how do you make sure you talked about the curve which happened over maybe 20 years and now it feels like, I mean, by the time this podcast comes out in a couple weeks, it might be outdated.

Speaker A: There'll Be something new.

Speaker B: How do you make sure that Bain stays ahead of those emerging tech trends and digital disruptions? Because it was the phone survey and then it was the online survey. Now it's the AI survey. Now it's the synthetic customer. How do we stay ahead of that curve and not get sort of. I know you're a surfer. I imagine there's some metaphor of, like, staying on the right part of the wave so you don't get. You get pulled under.

Speaker A: There is, but I don't think you want to. You don't want to. You don't want to miss the wave, and you don't want to. Yeah. Fall over the edge and get pounded. Okay. I guess there's part of this which does need to be supported from the center. Right. So it's the job of the firm and those of us in functional and leadership positions to make sure that everybody's got the very best tools to make sure that everybody's got training on those tools to make sure that to the extent that keeping skills fresh means attending external conferences, that that's happening too. So all of those things are, for sure, the responsibility of the firm. But I will tell you that the most important innovations, the biggest leaps we make, are always made at the edge. They're made by the teams, the junior teams, often the most junior people on the most distributed teams, because they are figuring out how to do something for a client or for their function, which we don't know how to do yet. And that's the thing which they sort of pioneer and troubleshoot and eventually get right and then share it with. With others. And that's always been, I think, one of the. One of the keys of Bain success, which is if you have something that works, you can trust that it will cash like wildfire here. And all of us share a responsibility to deliver the thing that works, to advance on whatever was best practice before we started our case and create the new best practice during our case.

Speaker B: Yeah. In some ways, it's not the role of the center is to tell you the best way to do something, but it's to keep an eye out on the horizon and see who finds the best way and then rapidly deploy it through the firm.

Speaker A: Yeah. You know, Christoph always talks about diffusion. Diffusion for sure, is part of our role as servant leaders. But, man, the good stuff happens on teams.

Speaker B: Yeah. And we had Ramesh on a while ago. We might have to have him back on. But it is also neat to see the investment. I feel like we have access to all the tools, like I'LL read about it or hear about it. Next thing you know, I'll get an email saying, we, we have it. Go play with it. See what you can make.

Speaker A: Keith, if we are ever like 48 hours late, we are going to hear about it.

Speaker B: Oh, for sure.

Speaker A: There are enough people at Bain tracking the new releases of each LL with so much intensity and rigor and curiosity. And just like, yeah, if we're in daylight, there will be people banging down the doors saying, where is our access?

Speaker B: Yeah, I have no reason not to build whatever I can imagine because I have every Lego that's in the market right now. I have all the Legos. Let's talk quickly about talent. You know, how does this change the type of talent we're hiring? I don't know that we want to go back and look up, you know, look on campus for a bunch of intellectual history majors or philosophy history majors.

Speaker A: What does that mean?

Speaker B: I don't know, that it worked out.

Speaker A: Wait, wait, wait. What was your, remember what your major was?

Speaker B: I was electrical engineering.

Speaker A: Yeah, I don't think we need those either, so.

Speaker B: I know. In fact, my alma mater, mit, no longer has that major. It's now like electrical engineering with computing or electrical engineering with something else, like as a standalone. It's not even a major anymore, I

Speaker A: thought, uh, yeah, no, I just assumed you were mostly doing like soldering and stuff like that.

Speaker B: Exactly. Just hanging out in lab. But how, how is it impacting the talent that we're looking for? Because it is a different skill set. Right? Like we're both, we're Both still here 30 years later, coming from very different places at a firm M that looks very different than the one that we joined. So there's got to be something else other than what it on the paper because that's not the common thread between me and you and it's not the common thread between most of the people at Bain. So what is it?

Speaker A: It's a great point. And what I'd say is we have always did a pretty broad talent spec, right? So we have always needed some proportion of general athletes, right? Exceptional horsepower, but not necessarily already expert. And we have also always needed, and I would say increasingly need. This is where there's a set of growing requirements. And we've always needed subject matter experts and we've always needed tech experts. And we need more of both of those now than we did in 99 when you and I were recruited. And the common thread of that group, the common denominator of both populations, because without it, nothing would happen. Is that they need to be excellent at teammates because that's what allows us to bring together the general and the technology and the subject matter experts. So you can be a lot of things at Bain, and in fact we need you to be a lot of things at Bain, but you have to be good at teaming and you have to be fluent in your area of expertise and innovative and you have to be curious. But our expectation is that the goalposts are going to move every, uh, five or six days or so. So it's important that you come in with a certain degree of fluency and expertise. But it's probably even more important that you're built to keep up. That's just a requirement of a job that satisfies all of us novelty seekers, but doesn't let you. You just don't get to do the same thing every day. You just don't. You don't get to. Or in my point of view, and I suspect in your point of view, you don't have to, but it does require you to be the kind of person who likes to keep up.

Speaker B: Yeah. And I've seen that a lot here and that the one thing that's going to be constant is that you're going to have to keep learning and keep changing. If you're the type of person wants to come in and do the same job for a year or the same job for two or three years, this probably isn't going to be the right industry for you. Forget whether or not Bain is the right place.

Speaker A: I don't know. Uh, maybe there are other places in this industry where you can trot out the same old shit, but no, not going to happen.

Speaker B: Tamar, I want to quickly talk about Vector here, which is the overarching title that we use to cover all of our digital capabilities inside Bain. How are you thinking about that work and uh, our talent needs in that particular part of the business? Because I know most people listening will hear Bain or see Bain and immediately think, well, it's just business consultants. And when I look at what our hiring has been and where I'm spending my time, it's got a lot more than just that.

Speaker A: Yeah. No, our greatest need right now is the hiring that we're doing in the technology space. And it's across a broad set of disciplines. We need product managers, we need engineers, we need data scientists, we need designers, we need people who are sort of expert at, ah, designing architectures. We need core ET in our business as well. So there really isn't a part of our Vector Organization where we aren't looking to grow our talent substantially in this moment. And yeah, like you're saying, I think you and I are pretty focused on that particular part of our growth right now.

Speaker B: And I will close us out there with a quick plug. Bain.comcareers is the careers website where you can go and look at all the wonderful roles that we are trying to fill right now. So please, pretty fleeing when this podcast is done, take a visit to the website.

Speaker A: I mean you could probably do it while the podcast is going.

Speaker B: That's true, that's true.

Speaker A: It's cool.

Speaker B: Tomorrow as we wrap up here, I want to get your thoughts. And this will probably be a fun segment that we can do on all of these podcasts now, which is trying to predict the future a few weeks in advance and see how it works out. But AI is changing so quickly. You know, looking ahead, what excites you most about the future of Bain and our approaches to AI for our business? What gets you excited about what's going to happen over the next several months or years?

Speaker A: Look, in the simplest terms, in the simplest terms, the work is getting more powerful, uh, and simultaneously the job is getting more interesting. And I don't know that I could have a sort of a more optimistic set of bullet points to describe the future with. Right. But the potential for revolutionizing something in this moment is just exceptionally high. Uh, so to do what the mission statement wants us to do, which is change the standards of excellence in our clients, industry and therefore in ours. If you can't do that now, you can't do it. This is possible right now. So that's one piece of it. And at the same time, the proportion of your job which is going to be tedious or brainless is going to be so low, it's going to be, it's just dropping and dropping. And I look back at, ah, my life as an AC or my life as a consultant and think, yes, I worked on a lot of things that stretched me that were hard and profound. And I also spent a lot of time, hours trying to figure out why my multi sheet model was roughing out.

Speaker B: Right, that's right. Those days are over.

Speaker A: It didn't make me grow. Maybe the first hour I grew and then the 10 hours that followed were just. Yeah, so it's just this, it's just this moment where the potential for impact is so high and the quality of life, and by quality of life, I mean the interest of life and the excitement of life, work life, I think has also never been higher.

Speaker B: And if People listening. Are tech professionals either in school looking for their first career as the next step after graduation, or. Or working professionals. Why would tech professionals consider Bain over a big tech firm?

Speaker A: It's a great question, and I would say it's just going to have a lot to do with how you want to participate, right? So if you want to place a single bet, uh, on a single technology and a single leadership team and say, that's going to be how I participate, and, man, I hope they get through their Series A, and, man, I hope that their technology turns out to be the winning technology. You should not, you should not go to Bain. But if you want to be absolutely certain that you are going to work across all of the most advanced platforms and technologies and that wherever they have the largest impact, that's the place you're going to be drawn to work, then you should come to Bain, because that's what we're going to do. We are not going to be tethered to a specific LLM or we're not going to be tethered to a specific platform or technology. We are going to be using whatever is driving the most change. And that both gives you a chance for a really diversified career, but it also removes some of the risk associated with picking the one horse which you and I, you know, you and I lived through that too. We saw a lot of our colleagues depart for startups in 99 and I don't know, we saw a lot of them come back. It was hard to pick which startup was going to be the next big thing.

Speaker B: Cool. And Tamar on that one, I want to close us out and thank you for your time today. It is as busy a time as people can imagine and you carving out an hour to talk with us and share a little bit of your journey and a little bit about what we're doing in AI Inside Bain, as the kickoff to this series, is very much appreciated. It's always good to talk with you.

Speaker A: Yeah, look, I'll come back and yap at you anytime.

Speaker B: It.