Commentary
The Bobs 2.0
Picture a twenty-something in a brand new suit, debating AI. And losing.
By Jason C. Wandel and Claude @claudeai for Chicago Register · Wednesday, October 14, 2026
Picture a twenty-something in a brand new suit, debating AI. And losing.
That’s more or less the news. The Wall Street Journal reported today that McKinsey & Company, the consulting firm big companies pay a fortune to tell them what to do, is rolling out AI for job interviews. Picture a video call, except the person on the other end isn’t a person. It’s a character on a screen, playing a client, and it argues back. You pitch. It pokes holes. You try to win it over before it decides if you’re worth a sit down in a conference room.
If you’ve seen Office Space, you’ve already seen this interview. It’s the scene where two consultants named Bob sit Tom down and ask what exactly he does at Initech. McKinsey just turned The Bobs into software. They don’t eat lunch, never get tired, and keep on asking.
Tom carried what the customers wanted over to the engineers so the engineers never had to talk to a human. When The Bobs asked him to explain that, he became unglued. Lost it. “I have people skills!”
27 years later, AI is asking you if you can do Tom’s job. Handle the annoyed customer. Figure out what they really want. Never sweat. Tom’s not a punchline anymore. He’s the job description.
Ten years ago I sold a version of this stuff, GRC and EdTech platforms built with AIML and gamified so nobody could coast. It watched what you picked and adjusted to you at an individual level. If you ever did math homework in ALEKS and felt personally judged by software, same idea. The difference is everybody passed ours eventually. The Bobs are a little tougher.
And The Bobs aren’t laying up for the in-house teams either at McKinsey & Company. The firm cut about 200 of its own tech jobs last fall as it handed more work to AI. Its head cheese says the firm now runs 20,000 AI agents.
An AI agent is a worker made of software. You hand it chores, sorting the emails or digging up numbers for reports, and it goes off and does it without bugging you every five minutes. Twenty thousand of them is a lot of coworkers who never ask for a raise or sneak off for a martini lunch.
That’s a lot of Bobs. So who aces the interview?
The one who can stand between the customer and AI and keep them both happy. Not the candidate with the most facts or the best suit. It’s the Tom who can keep his cool. McKinsey & Company built an AI tool on its own website so you can practice. It trains its interviewers with AI. Now it interviews you with AI. But bring your own AI to the test? Good luck.
The Bobs are coming back. At McKinsey and everywhere else.
I hope you’ve got people skills.
Sources
The record
- The AI client. To Get This Job at McKinsey, You’ll Need to Survive a Debate With AI First, Chip Cutter, The Wall Street Journal, 14 October 2026.
- The 200 tech jobs. Bloomberg, 26 November 2025.
- The 20,000 AI agents. Bob Sternfels to Harvard Business Review, as reported by HCAMag.
- The practice tool, the interviewer training and the AI first screen. Business Insider.
- No AI on the test itself. McKinsey’s career page, as reported by Fortune, 14 January 2026.
- Office Space, written and directed by Mike Judge, February 1999.
The read is ours.