This is Uncanny Valley, The Big Interview. I'm Katie Drummond.

Today's episode was sponsored by McKinsey & Company, and in this branded episode, I'm sitting down with Lorena Yee, Global Institute Director and Senior Partner at McKinsey & Company.

Yee has nearly 25 years of experience advising clients on growth, technology, and

transformation. She works with organizations across industries to deploy these new capabilities

to realize greater productivity, improve the relationship between people and machines, and spark

innovation in their businesses. As one of McKinsey's leading experts in AI, ye spearheads McKinsey's technology research, including its latest report

examining how people use or don't use AI in the workplace.

Hi Lorena, thank you for being here. Thank you. So before we dive into the main

conversation, we usually like to start these with a little quick fire around,

so like a warm up before a

workout. Are you game? I'm totally game. Okay, let's do this. What is the most active text thread you are on?

Oh, with friends geeking out about the latest releases in technology. What is a piece of tech that changed your

life? Oh, one that I love is the touchscreen, which I think is an unappreciated piece where we were able to really move to the iPhone, the smartphones, Android, and that changed the human relationship to phones.

And after that, we had the app stores and everything. And so for me, the watershed moment was reimagining how we interact with the phone.

Yeah. I mean, it's so wild. My daughter is eight years old and can't conceive of a world before she was able to, like, touch and tap things.

Well, exactly. And so it was interesting because a couple years after the iPhone made its moment, I remember

an executive was saying that he was looking at a child in preschool who took a piece of

paper and kept going like this.

Because why isn't the piece of paper going like this?

Yeah. And my most recent kind of more current example of that is I'm from San Francisco. So Waymo is everywhere. Yeah. Over 200,000 rides a week. And my colleague's daughter saw a taxi cab, something you'd see in New York all the time. And she said, Daddy, what is that? And he explained to her. And she said, oh, I get it. It's a Waymo with a person.

No. Yes. That's where we're going. That's where we're going. Okay, what does the algorithm know about you?

Well, if it's Netflix, it knows I like British drama. It does quite know. If it's the algorithm for an LLM, it knows that I'm a researcher.

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