Louise Herring, Partner, QB UKIIO Leader, McKinsey

I lead QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey, our AI centre of excellence, in the UK, Ireland, and Israel. I started my career in quite a different place. My undergraduate degree was in Chemistry. I loved the science and learning, but I discovered that it was best for everyone that I stay out of labs. So, I became a consultant to continue learning and joined McKinsey post-MBA (as the markets crashed each time I graduated, I was right to avoid a PhD). Scaling impact from digital and analytics has been a consistent theme in my time at McKinsey: I was elected Partner for my work supporting clients to design and run omnichannel transformations. Returning from maternity leave gave me a new ambition: I wanted to not only design transformations but to lead teams delivering the impact on the ground. This revelation coincided with our integration of QuantumBlack, and I found that I loved taking a translator role; shaping use cases and interpreting insights, and that my learning curve steepened as I began to work closely with our technical teams. I had found a new home. From my omnichannel days, I had seen that raising the bar on digital literacy mattered to scaling change, so I leaned into shaping and scaling McKinsey’s Analytics Academy, eventually leading it globally. At the end of 2022, I was privileged to be asked to take my current role as Lead of UK, Ireland, and Israel at QuantumBlack.