86% of Business Leaders Are Growing Their AI Budget in 2026- Here's the One Investment University Admissions Teams Cannot Afford to Skip

McKinsey & Co. is one of the most powerful management consulting firms globally. McKinsey's CEO, Bob Sternfels, has announced that McKinsey now has 60,000 workers on its books. Out of these, 40,000 are human beings. And then there are 20,000 AI agents. The aim is to have as many humans as AI agents on staff by the end of 2026. This is no tech firm trying out AI for fun. This is McKinsey & Co., one of the most respected management consulting firms in the world. McKinsey & Co. is saying to the world that the future of work is human and agentic working together. The question you need to ask yourself as a university right now is a very simple one: If McKinsey can use AI agents for student admissions and every other high-volume workflow at scale, what exactly is stopping you?

What McKinsey Actually Did- And Why It Matters Beyond Consulting

The McKinsey example is not really about McKinsey laying off people or automating processes for the sake of automation. It is actually about something much more important: allowing the most expensive and most talented people in the organisation to focus on doing the things that only humans can do.

McKinsey's AI agents are used for all those tedious tasks that used to fall on McKinsey consultants. Research compilation. Document processing. Data analysis. Routine client communication. McKinsey has AI agents for everything now. This means that McKinsey consultants are free to do only those things that humans can do and no AI can ever do.

The end result is not fewer employees. The end result is more powerful employees. Humans doing what humans do best. AI doing everything else. And the two together achieving things that either one can’t accomplish on their own. That is the model. And it is the model applied directly- and almost perfectly- to the way in which a university admissions team actually operates every single day.

The University Parallel Nobody is Drawing

Let’s think about the way in which an admissions counselor at a university actually spends their time. The answer is probably not one that admissions professionals want to give. The reality is that the majority of the time is spent answering the same questions over and over again. Tracking down documents that students somehow forgot to send in. Following up on inquiries that might or might not pan out. Manually entering changes into the CRM system after each and every call.

These are not the activities that require the trained, empathetic, experienced human university admissions counselor. These are the activities that require one- the activities that drain one – leaving very few moments and energies available for the student who is actually undecided and needs real advice. The international student with the tricky eligibility situation. The high-intent student who actually needs the university admissions counselor to close the deal.

McKinsey understood this at the enterprise level. Universities need to understand it at the admissions level. And the path to getting there is exactly the same- deploy a human and AI workforce for universities where AI handles the volume and humans handle the value.

Three Lessons Universities Should Take from McKinsey Right Now

The balance between AI and human work will change dramatically in favor of AI for all repetitive work. McKinsey didn’t use AI agents to replace human judgment. McKinsey used AI agents to preserve human judgment. Every call handled by Edysor's voice agent, every WhatsApp message sent out as a follow-up by Edysor, every document collected and verified by Edysor is a call or activity that no longer takes a counselor's most important asset- their time and attention.

AI agents should be treated as genuine members of the admissions team- not tools sitting on the side. McKinsey counts its AI agents as part of its workforce because they do real work. AI agents for student admissions that pick up calls, qualify leads, and update CRMs are doing the same- they are active contributors to enrollment outcomes, not passive software waiting to be configured.

The goal is not efficiency for efficiency's sake. The goal is to free human beings to perform work that actually requires human beings. McKinsey's change to an outcomes-based model was driven by AI's ability to free McKinsey consultants to perform work on results instead of information. A human and AI workforce for universities built on Edysor does exactly the same for university counselors- frees counselors to perform work on relationships with those students who need those relationships most.

What a Human and AI Admissions Workforce Looks Like in Practice

When a university runs the McKinsey model through Edysor, the admissions team looks fundamentally different- and produces fundamentally different results:

• Every student call is answered immediately by Edysor's voice agent – in human-like tones, in 35 languages, at any hour of the day- meaning the counselor only has to intervene when the conversation actually requires human judgment and skill
• Every WhatsApp message, website enquiry, and every single chat conversation is handled by Edysor's chat agent with persistence and memory retention capabilities- meaning no lead ever slips away and no student ever feels ignored
• Every single verified student receives their conditional offer letter in just 180 seconds- meaning the gap between qualified interest and committed enrollment is measured in minutes, not weeks
• Counselors get to focus on the day-to-day work of dealing with high-intent students, complex eligibility assessments, and relationship-building conversations- the work that actually requires human judgment and skill.

This means the AI-powered university admissions team isn't just the same team with fewer members- it's the same team with significantly more capabilities. Universities using this model via Edysor are seeing 15-35% increase in enquiry-to-application conversion rates, 40-60% reduction in manual workload, and 95% enquiry follow-up coverage every single admissions cycle.

The McKinsey Lesson Is Simple- Are Universities Ready to Apply It?

McKinsey didn't wait for the right moment to deploy AI agents. They didn't wait for the business conditions to be ripe. They didn't wait for the technology to be advanced enough. They just went ahead and implemented AI agents wherever they could be deployed better and more efficiently than human agents. They then put their human talent to work in areas where they add the most value. The result? A workforce that is more productive, more focused, and more capable than even the best human team.

The same opportunity exists today for universities- within their admissions departments, the scale is large, the stakes are high, and the difference between what AI can do and what humans currently do is enormous.

Edysor is the way universities create this AI-driven university admissions team- not in some hypothetical future, nor after some internal committee review, but from the very next student enquiry they receive. Book a demo today and see the McKinsey model in action within your university’s admissions team.