The new Google is destroying small businesses' reputations

Getty Images; Alyssa Powell/BI

Damian Mansell was stunned to see what Google was saying about his nascent business. When he searched for reviews of The Plastics Shed — the online building-plastics supplier he incorporated at the start of 2025 — the platform's AI overview said customer feedback was "overwhelmingly negative." It listed complaints about delayed deliveries, lying staff, and damaged products. While the company had some positive feedback, the summary said, its poor customer service was a "significant recurring issue." The good news: The reviews weren't actually about Mansell's company. They appeared to be for competitors and companies that sold actual plastic sheds. The bad news: He had no idea what to do about it.

Mansell, who lives in the UK, says. "I can see how that happens, but why should it happen with Google?" Mansell, who lives in the UK. "I mean, obviously, the forefront of AI technology."

To make matters worse, Mansell was paying Google about £700 a month to advertise, while the summaries warned people away. Following advice he found on online forums, he repeatedly submitted feedback to Google that the abstract was wrong. After a couple of weeks, it started to improve. AI has been an invaluable tool for him to build out his business, so he doesn't want to malign the tech in general, but he wishes there were more accountability when things go awry.

"AI gives the common man the knowledge, but it can also ruin the common man," he says.

Google's AI Overviews are rapidly becoming consumers' first impression of businesses. Instead of scanning reviews and websites, many users see a single synopsis that purports to blend information from across the internet into a comprehensive digest. When those summaries are inaccurate, misleading, or jumbled, business owners say they can cause serious reputational damage and financial losses, and there's often little recourse.

Mansell still wonders how much business the issue cost him. He's tried to get Google to refund some of his ad dollars, but he hasn't had any luck, despite his best efforts.

"I'm like a dog with a bone," he says. "But I met my match with Google."

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Internet search has changed drastically in the last few years: Instead of a list of links, Google often provides a single response that's supposed to summarize the constellation of online information. These overviews look right and sound confident, but they draw on a litany of sources with varying levels of reliability. They can even spit out information that is flat-out wrong. (Like recommending people make glue pizza.) Misinformation on the internet isn't new, but the clean, concise, AI-concocted package is.

"With the traditional search engine, the user sees multiple things. So if one of them has something wrong, chances are something else would counterbalance it," says Chirag Shah, a professor at the University of Washington's Information School. That's now gone, and with AI overviews, you're getting "The Answer," which may or may not be correct.

I look at the AI overview, I wouldn't call me.

For business owners, the consequences can be more than a mild annoyance or temporary confusion. These AI summaries are becoming their digital storefronts. Across the internet, you can find entrepreneurs and managers grumbling that AI summaries mix them up with other companies, surface complaints that are directed at someone else, or dole out false facts.

Earlier this year, Betty Whitney started noticing that Google's overviews were conflating her company — NW Select Property Management in Idaho — with similarly named businesses. The top panel seemed to be merging her firm with one in the region that closed years ago and mixing her reviews up with property managers in other states.

"If I'm a customer, and I'm looking for a property management company, and I look at the AI overview, I wouldn't call me," she says.

Whitney has spent months trying to amend the situation. Like Mansell, she's used Google's feedback mechanism to give overviews a "thumbs down" when they're wrong, and she's made some adjustments to her website to try to feed the AI crawlers more accurate data. After bringing her problem to a Google support forum, she got in touch with a third-party SEO expert who was able to help her out — sort of. The overview has gotten better, but it still periodically reverts to the mistake-filled version.

Three years after relocating, Philippa Main, a real estate agent in Northern Virginia, still can't completely convince Google that she's no longer in Florida. When she searches her name, most of the information that comes up about her is correct, but then there's a line that confidently states that she's been "servicing the Tampa Bay area since 2014," even though it sits right above her Virginia address. Main's tried everything she could think of to get it adjusted, combing the internet to try to find where the AI is drawing from, emailing Google, and asking friends to report the issue.

"There's so much competition in my industry that if any single thing seems off, someone's just going to call the next person on the list," she says. It's especially frustrating for small businesses, because "we're just trying to do everything that we can to compete with these massive companies who actually do have direct lines to Google or their representatives," she says. "Google just doesn't seem to care."

In a statement, a Google spokesperson told me that its search-related AI experiences are "rooted in our quality ranking systems and are designed to present a range of perspectives" from all over the internet. "AI Overviews are responsive to people's specific queries; for example, if someone specifically searches for complaints about a business, the generated response will likely show relevant information from sources across the web," they said.

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It's no secret that AI is not always a bastion of truth — almost everyone who's used the technology has experienced a response from it that's highly off-base at some point. As the New York Times wrote in April, Google processes over five trillion searches a year, and even if its overviews are right nine times out of 10, that still means half a trillion wrongs. Google acknowledges that while the overwhelming majority of its overviews are accurate, there can be cases where they miss context or misinterpret content. A Google spokesperson said the study the Times cited has "serious holes."

Google's summaries synthesize information from many places — a big source is, obviously, the company website, but it also gobbles up Reddit posts, 10-year-old blogs, and Yelp reviews. The platform provides links that are supposed to back up its claims, but those links don't always support the output. AI has also been known to hallucinate, meaning it invents plausible-sounding things from thin air.

"There's so much room for error," says Lily Ray, an SEO and AI search consultant and the founder of Algorythmic, a consultancy.

The overviews are delivered with such assurance that people don't realize they're looking at an extracted or generated answer that may be incomplete or incorrect. Instead of clicking on five links to compare information or just spending a few minutes confirming, they skim the automated summary and call it a day. The AI says this roofing company's reviews are terrible? Onto the next one! Rarely do people dig in to check if it's pulling complaints for a business in another state.

There's so much room for error.

Search industry professionals say this is a new frontier for businesses. They no longer have to focus so heavily on search rankings but must instead manage the AI's interpretation of their reputations. It's not about chasing clicks —it's about making sure AI knows you exist and is nice and correct about you. Ray says it's the "biggest change to search" she's seen in her 16-year career.

This brave new world presents all sorts of nuances and complications. Google likes to cite Reddit a lot, which "can go awry very fast," Ray says. Reddit has a lot of good information, but it can also be a little wild. The same goes for YouTube comments, which the AI also seems to like. Some brands suffer from an information void: there's not a lot of content out there about them, so AI tries to fill in the gaps or comes up with bad answers. Or, they've got a name problem where they're too close to another entity, and the model can't tell who's who. There may be bad actors who intentionally leave false or negative information about businesses online for AI summaries to pick up. Even simple facts, such as store hours or phone numbers, require a concerted effort across the entire internet to keep straight. "There's so much maintenance work that has to go into keeping a brand's content and information accurate and up to date," Ray says.

Michael King, the founder and CEO of iPullRank, a digital marketing agency, tells me he focuses on citation accuracy and on gaining some influence over AI outputs. "The way these systems work is they're basically doing a bunch of searches in the background, and then they're feeding content to the large language model," King says. Businesses need to create more "surface area" — meaning publishing more content and targeting more keywords — to help AI find the right answer. He encourages clients to position themselves as the experts on their own brands.

"You've got to think of it as more like a reputation management campaign than your classic SEO campaign," King says. "It's just far more multidimensional."

Ben Fisher does this for a living and still runs into problems. He noticed that Google's AI summary was warning that his company — Steady Demand, a SEO and social media consultancy for small businesses — was a scam. After doing some digging, he realized it was referring to an old Reddit thread about a similarly named app and had to take some time out to "train" Google to know the difference.

"The big problem is there's nobody to contact. The other big problem is you search once, and you're done," Fisher says. Large language models don't produce the same results every time, even for the same questions, so people don't realize one result might not match the next month, week, or minute. "It's still a situation where you should be monitoring things on a regular basis," he says. "Otherwise, you're just not going to know why you're not getting calls."

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This is a difficult issue to tackle from a technological, entrepreneurial, and regulatory point of view. LLMs are improving, but they're never going to be perfect. Business owners can do their best to keep an eye on how they're showing up in search results, but they've also got 9,000 other things to do.

Reasonable minds — and different countries and legal systems — can disagree about how responsible Google should be when the robot screws up. In Canada, a musician has filed a $1.5 million lawsuit against Google claiming that its AI summary falsely identified him as a sex offender. A court in Germany recently made a preliminary ruling that Google is liable for false statements made in its AI overviews. A Google spokesperson said that the German case focuses on "specific and narrow errors," not the way overviews display content, and that the company disagrees with the ruling and plans to appeal. Shah says that in the US, we have "very little consumer protection" for these types of issues.

"I don't think lawmakers even fully understand the technology enough and the implications to be able to do anything," he says.

In the meantime, business owners are left white-knuckling it, hoping that the mysterious technology at the heart of those AI summaries looks kindly upon them. That's the case with Mansell, who's proud to say that Google's overview of the Plastics Shed is now "fantastic", just like many of his actual reviews.

"It does worry me with regard to what can be said about you without any recourse," he says.

Despite his frustrations with the summary and failed attempts to get a refund, Mansell still pays to advertise with Google — otherwise, people don't click through to his website. "I just gave up," he says. "It was just an absolute pointless exercise."

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Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

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The bipartisan backlash to Big Tech's AI data centers is getting harder for politicians to ignore

Americans are pushing back against AI data center developments.

Richmond Times-Dispatch/Richmond Times-Dispatch via Getty Images

• AI data centers have become a minefield for US lawmakers ahead of the midterm elections.
• Politicians who once courted AI data centers in their towns and states are now restricting them.
• That can mean breaking with Trump, who has called resisting data centers a "mistake."

To build or not to build?

That is the question local politicians are asking themselves as Big Tech's push to develop enormous AI data centers runs up against a growing number of Americans revolting against them.

That's especially true in Republican-controlled states, where much of the data center boom is taking hold. Republican governors and state lawmakers, as the midterms fast approach, are beginning to acknowledge voters who are concerned about the proliferation of large data centers, even if that means breaking with President Donald Trump.

For some Republicans, that acknowledgment came too little too late.

Utah Senate President J. Stuart Adams lost the state's Republican primary in June after he approved a data center development backed by "Shark Tank" investor Kevin O'Leary.

Lee Perry, a former commissioner in Box Elder County, where O'Leary's development hopes to land, said supporting that project cost him his election race, too.

"Do I think that the data center vote cost me the election? Yes, I do," Perry told The Salt Lake Tribune in June.

All across the country, Americans are rallying against AI data centers. They have swarmed local planning meetings, launched petitions, held protests, and taken legal action to bar new developments. Straining power grids, water use, noise, and rising utility costs are just a few of their concerns.

Although surveys conducted this year by Gallup and The Pew Research Center show that Democrats account for the majority of the opposition, Republicans aren't far behind. The data center issue is increasingly a bipartisan one.

"Seven in 10 Americans oppose constructing data centers for artificial intelligence in their local area, including nearly half, 48%, who are strongly opposed," the Gallup survey said.

President Donald Trump has supported accelerating AI data center construction in the US.

Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

That's a dilemma for Republicans, who must balance the will of their constituents with that of both Trump, who is the leader of their party, and the big-spending tech companies looking to build in their districts.

Winning the AI race has been a central focus of the Trump administration. The White House has largely backed Big Tech's efforts to build data centers by accelerating federal permitting and supporting the $500 billion Stargate Project, an OpenAI initiative to expand AI infrastructure in the United States.

"Simply put, we need to 'Build, Baby, Build!'" the White House's 28-page AI action plan, published in July, says.

That same month, however, Americans attended a nationwide protest against AI data centers hosted by Humans First, a conservative nonprofit led by Amy Kremer, a MAGA activist who has been at the center of most major conservative movements of the last two decades, including the "Stop the Steal" rallies that culminated in a riot on Capitol Hill.

"This technology has been built on American data with American taxpayer dollars invested into these companies with American energy and American land," Kremer earlier told Business Insider. "We have no voice in how the technology is used or how it impacts our lives, and that's not right."

Republicans side with the voters

Trying to avoid a similar fate to their colleagues in Utah once November rolls around, Republican governors and legislators across the country are now breaking with the Trump administration and enacting restrictions on data center development.

Gov. Greg Abbott is walking the tightrope in Texas, where available land, access to an electricity grid, and potential tax breaks have made it a popular choice for companies building data centers.

Gov. Greg Abbott and Google CEO Sundar Pichai in Midlothian, Texas, in November 2025.

The Dallas Morning News/Hearst Newspapers/The Dallas Morning News via Getty Images

Abbott, a longtime ally of Trump, initially went all in to expand data center construction in the state. In November 2025, Abbott announced a $40 billion investment from Google to boost AI infrastructure. Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Amazon, and SpaceX are all building massive AI data centers in Texas.

Then, Texans began to revolt. Residents in places like Abilene, Texarkana, and Lubbock have all held protests against data centers in recent months. In June, San Marcos became the first city in Texas to enact a data center ban. One month later, locals in Henderson County pushed back so fiercely that officials ultimately axed a planned project.

And so Abbott has now changed course, directing the local utility commission and the state's electrical grid operator to shield residents from data center infrastructure costs. He's called for a ban on data centers in rural Texas communities and, most recently, said all projects must undergo an audit before moving forward.

"Governor Abbott's top priority is to protect Texans' safety and quality of life and ensure the integrity of our power grid and water supply," a spokesperson for Abbott told Business Insider.

Abbot's choice to essentially freeze data center projects may gain him favor with his constituents, but not with Trump, who last week said rejecting data center development was a "mistake."

Despite backlash from Americans, the Trump administration has broadly supported AI data center development.

Getty Images

Other Republican governors and lawmakers are similarly changing course on the data center build-out.

In April, Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Jarrett Coleman and State Rep. Jamie Walsh proposed bills to repeal a state tax break for data centers and impose a moratorium on data center development applications.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill in May implementing new regulations around data center developments that give local governments the authority to approve or reject data center proposals. Last month, Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen signed an executive order ending data center tax breaks and called for a pause on new data center construction.

Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican nominee for governor of Ohio, pledged on Thursday to implement an "Ohioans-first" policy for AI data centers. He said that if a data center is built in a community, residents would not have to pay for electricity at home, they'd pay lower property taxes, and the data center would be required to comply with certain environmental requirements.

"To ensure urgency, I will further issue an executive order on my first day in office to immediately halt the approval of any new data center project announcements in Ohio, until the above-mentioned data center legislation takes effect."

Even Trump himself has made some small concessions. Last month, his administration expanded the Ratepayer Protection Pledge, which is meant to keep electricity bills for American households and businesses low.

"The United States never settles for second, and we don't under this administration... we live by the motto 'America First,'" Trump said in a press release about the pledge. "Thanks in part to this incredible [AI] technology boom, investments are pouring into the United States from all over the world."

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The best and worst places to build a tech career

Getty Images; Tyler Le/BI

How far we get in our careers, we tend to believe, depends on us: our intelligence, our temperament, our hustle. But where we work and the support we get there matter immensely too. Does your company promote from within, or does it hire senior people from elsewhere? Does it spend real money on training and mentoring? Is it somewhere you'd want to stay for the long haul?

The age-old problem for job seekers is that, from the outside, it's hard to know. Even if you land at a business with a great reputation, it might turn out that jobs in your particular department are dead ends.

So two nonprofits, the Burning Glass Institute and the Schultz Family Foundation, set out to uncover where the best jobs are. It analyzed the career histories of 12 million workers across 1,750 of the largest employers in the country from 2019 to 2024, pulling data from websites like LinkedIn and Glassdoor. It scored each occupation at each business on three factors: promotions (the likelihood of rising to a higher position internally within five years of starting the job), retention (the share of workers who stay at least three years), and salary.

The result is the most useful database I've seen for anyone considering a job in corporate America — a role-by-role guide to the amazing, the average, and the abysmal places to build a career. Most businesses have a huge range depending on the position. At the average company, there's an 81-percentile point gap between its best- and worst-performing roles on promotions and retention. At Chanel, for example, fashion designers rank in the 97th percentile for retention among other fashion designing jobs across the country, while project management specialists rank in the 16th percentile.

It's a gigantic repository, so I asked Burning Glass to narrow it down to six prominent tech occupations that a typical computer science major might pursue: software engineers, data scientists, software quality assurance analysts and testers, computer systems and security engineers, IT project managers, and IT systems analysts. The groupings are broad and based on the government's occupational categories; the grouping for IT project managers includes product managers.

In the search bar below, start typing one of those six occupational groupings to see how people in that role fare at a bunch of marquee businesses. If you're reading this on your phone, scroll to the right to see the percentiles for all three factors — promotion, retention, salary — or turn your phone sideways. Click or tap any column header to sort the results.

Across these roles, a few familiar tech companies emerge as the clear winners. Software is at the heart and soul of these companies, so it makes sense that they would treat the people building it exceptionally well. Two companies in particular stand out: Amazon and Salesforce. Tech workers at both get the whole package: top-of-market pay, fantastic opportunities for advancement, and jobs they tend to stick with. Take Salesforce's software engineers: They rank in the 97th percentile for promotions, 98th for retention, and 96th for salary. It's a win-win-win — one of the best jobs in America. Adobe, Google, and Microsoft also aren't far behind.

Other tech giants also pay incredibly well, but the picture beyond pay is more mixed. Apple doesn't offer that many promotions, but people tend to stay anyway. Uber is the opposite: Its workers move up at a decent clip, but the company struggles to hang on to them. Meta has a mediocre record on promotions, while retention varies wildly depending on the role.

Outside of Silicon Valley, one of the best companies for tech roles is Liberty Mutual, which outperforms much of Big Tech on career advancement and longevity, even if its salaries don't quite reach Valley levels. For example, software engineers there get promoted 3.7 times as often as those at Meta. USAA also stands out for how well their tech workers fare.

Once you look beyond the highest-paying employers, there are even more hidden gems across the economy. John Deere and Northwestern Mutual offer unusually strong advancement prospects and career longevity with middle-of-the-road salaries. In healthcare, people stay so long at the Mayo Clinic that both its IT project managers and systems analysts rank in the 99th percentile for retention, even though both jobs pay less than two-thirds of comparable roles elsewhere.

There are also far less appealing options for tech workers. At Goldman Sachs, software engineers are paid very well, but they see few opportunities to move up and tend to leave pretty quickly. Its data scientists fare poorly on advancement and retention too, without receiving the same premium in salary. At Deloitte, many technical roles appear to be a similarly bad deal: People don't move up much and they don't stick around for long.

These nuances matter a lot to tech workers today, even though they might not have worried about them as much in the past. Just a few years ago, everyone from coders to data scientists was in such high demand that, if their careers stalled at one employer, they could easily jump ship for a bigger title and more pay. That's why tech workers were notorious for job-hopping every few years. When it was easy to leave, a weak internal career path wasn't such a big deal.

We're in a very different economy now. With hiring at a standstill and rolling layoffs becoming the norm, tech workers are longing for something that I rarely heard them talk about in the 2010s: stability. What so many want today is a steady home — a good employer that will keep them engaged and help them grow for many years. A lot of the young people I speak to say they'd take that over a higher salary or a flashy brand-name employer.

That might sound like a naive desire for a world that no longer exists: an era of corporate loyalty when employers took care of their employees. But Burning Glass' analysis shows that the steady homes people want aren't entirely a relic of the past. There are still great employers — or at the very least, great employers for particular jobs — if you know where to look.

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Aki Ito is a chief correspondent at Business Insider.

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Hackers are targeting US water systems. Here’s what that means.

Water utilities in at least seven states have reported cyberattacks to the FBI.

d3sign/Getty Images

• At least seven states have reported cyberattacks on water systems.
• The FBI has said hackers have remotely accessed devices and impacted water operations.
• Cybersecurity experts say hackers can limit a water utility's ability to monitor and control its system.

Government officials are warning about a wave of cyberattacks on water utilities in the US.

At least seven states have reported incidents to the FBI since July 27. The agency hasn't identified the attackers' motivation or identity, calling them only "malicious cyber actors" and saying they were remotely accessing internet-facing computers used by water utilities. The hackers changed settings, IP addresses, and passwords, the FBI said. In some cases, the attacks weakened the plant operators' ability to monitor and control their equipment.

Cybersecurity experts have voiced concerns for years about cyber vulnerabilities in water systems and other critical infrastructure, such as energy and healthcare, including the possibility of attacks by foreign adversaries. In April, the FBI and other federal agencies warned about ongoing Iran-affiliated cyber threats, including those targeting water systems.

What a hacker can actually do when they access a water system varies widely depending on the device they hack. There's also a huge variety in how the roughly 148,000 public drinking water systems in the US operate, including the about 50,000 systems that supply drinking water to residents year-round.

"It really depends on the device and what that device is managing or controlling," Kevin Morley, federal relations manager for the American Water Works Association, told Business Insider.

"It could be a pump, it could be a motor, and it could be something as simple as a tank-level log that just says the tank is full or not full."

Some of the recent attacks have resulted in real-world impacts, such as loss of water pressure and flooding, according to the FBI, though the agency did not say where those incidents occurred.

City officials in Braham, Minnesota, said a cyberattack shut down the controls for its well and water treatment plant, temporarily causing the city to rely on its water tower stores. State officials said more than 30 community water systems in Minnesota were targeted last week, while officials in Michigan said nine water systems were targeted.

The hackers accessed devices with internet access

Joshua Corman, executive-in-residence for public safety and resilience at the Institute for Security and Technology, said that connecting the computers that control water equipment to the internet creates an additional avenue for attackers.

"With great connectivity comes great responsibility," Corman said, riffing on a famous line popularized by the Spider-Man comics.

In a notice issued to water utilities last week, the FBI and the EPA said the recent attacks targeted devices connected to the internet. The agencies advised water utilities to disconnect certain computers — called Programmable Logic Controllers, or PLCs — from the public-facing internet and to strictly control their network access, among other measures.

Corman said PLCs can be programmed with "if this happens, then that happens" functions. A utility might set one to keep water pressure within a certain range, to alert workers if it gets too high or too low, or to shut off a pump before equipment is damaged. Corman said a hacker could, for instance, disable an alert that would notify an employee that part of the system needs attention.

Disruptions to water service can have far-reaching effects, including on businesses, hospitals, and fire response. "No water is no hospital in two to four hours," said Corman, who runs an initiative called UnDisruptable27 focused in part on improving the resilience of water systems that support hospitals.

Improving cybersecurity at water utilities

Many cybersecurity experts agree that more could be done to shore up the cybersecurity of critical utilities.

Morley said that setting universal cybersecurity standards for water utilities in the US can be challenging because they vary widely in the populations they serve, the systems they use, and the extent of their existing cybersecurity measures. He said what's right for one utility might not be right for another.

The American Water Works Association has advocated for developing nationwide minimum cybersecurity requirements for water utilities, shaped by water and cybersecurity professionals.

Improving protections for water systems is also a matter of national security, said Corman, who advised on cybersecurity efforts for Operation Warp Speed during the pandemic.

He added that water utilities should strengthen their resilience before a more serious attack forces them to do so.

"You want to dig a well before you're thirsty."

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Create less AI slop and have more fun: 4 McKinsey partners told us what they want from junior consultants

Courtesy of McKinsey & Co; Isabel Fernandez-Pujol/BI

• Business Insider asked four senior partners at McKinsey what they wished their associates would stop doing.
• Their answers included creating less AI slop and spending more time socializing with colleagues.
• Some junior consultants forget that the job can adapt to their lifestyle, one said.

There's no secret recipe to impressing your boss — or is there?

In late June, four senior McKinsey & Co partners sat down with Business Insider to discuss what it takes to reach the uppermost ranks of the consulting firm.

Three of them had recently been promoted from partner to senior partner, and the fourth had been made a distinguished partner, a new senior leadership role at McKinsey that recognizes deep, specialized expertise.

They now sit among the firm's most senior and best-paid leaders, a group that numbers more than 2,500 globally. Between them, they work across life sciences, corporate finance, financial services, and artificial intelligence.

When asked what they wished their junior colleagues would stop doing, the group hesitated — then launched into an animated exchange about the pitfalls and missteps they see in the workplace.

In late June, Business Insider's Polly Thompson sat down with four newly promoted McKinsey senior partners. Their conversation covered topics from careers and promotions to AI and the future of consulting.

Follow Polly Thompson's reporting here for more of her coverage.

More from the interview:

• Meet 4 of the people who made it to the top of McKinsey this year

Stop creating AI slop

Three of the partners' first responses was: Stop producing slop.

The AI slop issue is not unique to junior colleagues — many people use the technology poorly, said Alex Deverson, a London-based senior partner who works on life sciences. The result is a "lot of AI slop" — content that looks good on the surface, but doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

Anna Mattsson, a corporate finance specialist based in Switzerland, said that in her practice, some associates are not using AI at all.

"I sometimes feel, 'Am I the one having to remind them to actually do it?'" she told Business Insider.

That's happening less frequently, Mattsson added, but she saw a clear difference between consultants who used AI to get a head start and those who don't use it.

McKinsey senior partners (left to right), Anna Mattsson, Holger Hürtgen, Maria Albonico, Alex Devereson.

McKinsey

The variation in how people use AI is "crazy," said Holger Hürtgen, a Germany-based distinguished partner at QuantumBlack, McKinsey's AI arm. He said some junior colleagues "surprise him really positively" and teach him things about AI, whereas others' AI use "feels like it's coming from two years ago."

It happens at both ends of the spectrum — junior and senior, Hürtgen said. "It reads nicely, but it's really stupid," he said of some AI-generated work.

Scrutinizing AI-generated work requires more critical thinking than most people give it credit for, Devereson added, and younger, less experienced colleagues have less instinct for what's right and wrong.

McKinsey has aggressively incorporated AI into its workflows, first through a generative AI platform called Lilli, and increasingly through AI agents. The technology is becoming part of the "lifeblood" of how McKinsey works, Kate Smaje, McKinsey's Global Leader for technology and AI, told Business Insider in June.

Get out there and socialize

Hürtgen, who has worked at McKinsey for 20 years, said the social life at the firm has become quieter since his early days. Given the choice between joining a team dinner and getting to sleep earlier or exercising, he said some younger colleagues chose the latter.

"I think this firm is very much about micro communities, getting to know new people. And you get to know people during social events," he said.

That does not mean junior consultants need to party hard — though Hürtgen joked that he has partied more than many young people appear to today — but that they should at least have a nice dinner, he said.

"Enjoy the journey, not just the objective," he added.

Mattsson, the Switzerland-based senior partner, also said junior consultants should spend more time building relationships with their teams.

"Some of my best friends are the clients and the associates I worked with back in the day," she said.

Avoid this 'recipe for unhappiness'

Many young consultants join McKinsey hoping to climb the ranks to partner. Devereson cautioned against going in with an overly strategic outlook.

"I would encourage people to not think like that," Devereson said. Attempting to chart a path to partner is a "recipe for unhappiness," he said.

Devereson, who is based in London, said he was "never particularly strategic," focusing instead on what he was doing in the moment while remaining open to opportunities. He advised associates to follow what they enjoy, pointing to Mattsson as an example of that approach working.

Mattsson joined McKinsey six years ago after a career spent mostly at Deloitte and had hoped to be promoted last year. When that didn't happen, she was "majorly disappointed."

She then decided to focus specifically on what she enjoyed at work rather than trying to do everything, and approached this year's promotion round without any expectations.

The now-senior partner said that coming from outside, she hadn't quite understood the system at McKinsey: "It's a very different firm here than many other places."

Find a way to make the lifestyle work

Stop ruling yourself out of opportunities because you fear your career is incompatible with the lifestyle you want.

That's the advice Maria Albonico, a London-based senior partner focused on financial services, said she'd give to junior consultants.

She said she has seen younger colleagues leave or decide an opportunity is not for them because they imagine it won't work with having a family.

"I was surprised over and over by how much the circumstances adapt. If a place really wants you, if you are really a right fit for a place, the place will adapt to you," said Albonico.

Clockwise from top left: Anna Mattsson, Alex Devereson, Maria Albonico, and Holger Hürtgen

McKinsey

Devereson said junior consultants can also speak up when the demands of the job become unworkable. "If you don't like the circumstances, change the circumstances," he said.

He recalled reviewing one project's workload, staffing, and meeting schedule and realizing the plan was structurally impossible. At first, he tried to compensate by working longer hours. Eventually, he told the partner, "I think the physics are off. I don't think this works."

Personal circumstances could also make an assignment impractical, he said. In his case, that means not serving clients in the Bay Area from London while caring for a three-month-old.

"People just believe that the hand they're dealt is the hand they have to live with," Devereson said. "Whereas, actually, we can do a lot to help each other if we know that we need help."

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The US helping Japan prop up the yen shows why the dollar is so hard to replace, Goldman Sachs says

US-Japan's yen intervention highlights the dollar's enduring appeal as a global reserve currency, Goldman Sachs says.

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• The US and Japan's rare joint intervention has raised questions about the dollar's reserve appeal.
• Goldman Sachs says the episode actually highlights why dollar reserves remain so useful to central banks.
• Deep US markets let central banks build dollar reserves in calm times and access them in a crunch.

The Treasury's efforts to help Japan strengthen the yen aren't a reason for central banks to rethink their dollar reserves, according to Goldman Sachs.

If anything, the rare joint intervention in the Japanese currency highlights one of the dollar's biggest advantages: Central banks can readily access their dollar reserves when markets get rough, Goldman analysts said in a note on Thursday.

The comments come amid concerns that Washington's more hands-on approach to the Treasury market could make reserve managers less comfortable holding dollar assets. Goldman said that concern is misplaced in Japan's case.

Goldman said the argument hinges on an assumption: that the Treasury's willingness to help Japan sell Treasurys today means it could be willing to stand in the way of another reserve manager trying to sell in the future.

"This seems like quite a leap," the bank's analysts wrote.

The concerns have emerged as the US and Japan have stepped up efforts to support the yen, which was trading around 158 against the dollar late Thursday, compared with roughly 164 before the intervention last week.

The coordinated intervention with the US followed months of yen weakness that pushed the currency to a 40-year low.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has proposed increasing the limit on the Federal Reserve's Foreign and International Monetary Authorities (FIMA) repo facility, which allows foreign central banks to temporarily raise dollars against their Treasury holdings rather than selling those securities outright.

That could help reduce disruption from sudden Treasury sales.

However, Goldman's analysts said they are "far from persuaded that Treasury's intervention signals new fragilities in the Treasury market relative to before."

Instead, it just shows that the current US administration is "more willing to intervene than in the recent past."

Goldman said the episode illustrates a broader advantage of dollar reserves: The depth and liquidity of US capital markets make it easier for central banks to build up dollar reserves in normal times and access them when markets come under stress.

However, the dollar still faces longer-term risks to its dominance, Goldman said, including uncertainty around US institutions.

But Japan's experience underscores an advantage rival reserve assets struggle to match.

"When it comes time to intervene, most central banks still need Dollars," Goldman's analysts wrote.

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A surprising backer of America’s affordable housing push: big banks

Jamie Dimon's JPMorgan Chase pledged $750 billion to housing projects this week, notably in San Francisco.

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• JPMorgan Chase announced it will direct $750 billion to US housing projects through 2035.
• Big banks, like Citi and Bank of America, have made similar investments in affordable housing.
• Public-private partnerships could help boost housing supply — and banks get a tax break.

JPMorgan Chase announced plans to shell out $750 billion to boost America's home supply — and it isn't the only big bank in the housing development game.

The Jamie Dimon-led financial giant said this week that it will finance 1 million affordable housing units and help 500,000 buyers purchase homes over the next decade through its "American Dream Initiative," which focuses on local-level economic development. While the firm is already among the US' top multifamily and residential mortgage lenders, this is the biggest investment it has ever made in homebuilding initiatives.

"Housing, you have two issues: One is affordable, so we're doing a lot of affordable housing," Dimon told CNBC on August 5. "The other one is supply. Supply is mostly around permitting, approvals, local zoning requirements."

It's part of a larger phenomenon. Banks are partnering with developers to help cities build multifamily developments — like apartment buildings — from the very beginning. And it could benefit both banks, which are encouraged through various government programs to make these kinds of community investments, and residents in expensive cities seeking an affordable home.

A slew of banks have committed to affordable housing financing

Building enough houses and apartments to meet America's demand isn't cheap. In New York City, for example, Mayor Zohran Mamdani's pledge to build 200,000 new affordable homes is slated to cost $22 billion in capital investment over five years. Governments and independent developers in NYC, San Francisco, Atlanta, and more have called on banks to help fund housing projects.

Wall Street giants often back affordable housing ventures, alongside philanthropists and local governments. Business Insider recently toured a Midtown Manhattan hotel-to-apartment conversion that's being partially funded by Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase, as well as an affordable housing development for seniors in Brooklyn that was partially backed by TD Bank.

Local property developer David Schwartz previously told Business Insider that this support is especially necessary for affordable housing. Land, construction, and architecture costs are the same as any other space, but long-term tenant returns are lower than in market-rate or luxury buildings. "That's the challenge," he said.

While banks have long had a hand in real estate, their investment in affordable housing developments is gaining momentum. Bank of America provided upwards of $42 billion in financing for affordable housing efforts between 2020 and 2025, and Citi committed $60 billion to housing affordability efforts between 2026 and the early 2030s. This comes as the US' affordable housing supply continues to lag demand, and the rental vacancy rate is climbing because many lower- and middle-income households can't afford to pay the market rate.

For residents, bank investment in housing could be good news. JPMorgan said roughly $200 million of its multibillion-dollar investment will be directed toward affordable developments in San Francisco, which Dimon has expressed specific concern about as one of America's priciest markets.

Olivia Barrow Strauss, vice president of housing at the JPMorgan Chase Policy Center, told Business Insider that funding must go hand in hand with strong policy. "That includes modernizing zoning and permitting, unlocking underused land, and strengthening public-private partnerships so more housing can move from concept to construction," she said. Because "capital alone won't solve the country's housing affordability challenges."

Banks and cities could both benefit

What's in it for the banks? Investing in affordable homes is a potential path to tax breaks and economic development.

The federal government offers a low-income housing tax credit to investors and developers who build or rehabilitate affordable housing, and a new markets tax credit to incentivize investment in low-income and distressed communities. Parties can then claim an annual tax break — so long as a portion of the apartments is set aside for low- and middle-income residents or materially improves residents' lives in eligible areas. Credits like this are sometimes distributed at the state and local level, and banks might be able to write off their assistance for first-time homebuyers.

Citi has published disclosures that it "may employ a combination of taxable and tax-exempt loans or bonds, a combination of taxable and tax-exempt loans or bonds; Low Income, Historic or New Markets Tax Credits; and government and private subsidies," as part of its housing plan. Bank of America made similar statements in regulatory filings. It's unclear exactly which subsidies JPMorgan Chase qualifies for, and how much the bank's annual tax break will be, but government credits are likely a factor in its $750 billion investment.

"Tax credits and subsidies are important tools to encourage public and private investments that create or preserve affordable housing because they can help close financing gaps," Karen Purcell, head of Community Development Banking at JPMorgan Chase, told Business Insider. Still, these credits aren't a cure-all, she said, "and often don't reach the 'missing middle,' which is why moderate-income housing remains chronically undersupplied."

Passed in the 1970s, the Community Reinvestment Act also requires banks to provide financial support to the communities where they operate, including low- and moderate-income neighborhoods. Backing affordable housing developments and providing resources to homebuyers are ways banks can comply with this law. CRA requires banks to publish their performance review. Between 2020 and 2023, JPMorgan Chase's disclosures show the bank scored "outstanding" in 31 of the 56 lending areas — criteria that's based on both the bank's lending behavior and the demographics it served.

The public sector is making big bets on affordable housing, too. Congress passed a bipartisan housing bill in July. The law is set to loosen zoning restrictions, boost resources for communities impacted by natural disasters, and make it harder for major corporations to buy residential real estate. Big bank investment won't be capped by this law, and it may create more opportunities for public-private affordable housing ventures in the future.

As Dimon put it to CNBC, "The bill the House passed is a very good bill, and then we have to do complements to it locally."

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