NEW YORK — Management consulting giant McKinsey & Company disclosed record revenues Tuesday, driven primarily by a lucrative new practice of charging clients $850 per hour to input their confidential business data into commercially available AI tools.

The firm's Digital Analytics division has billed over $340 million year-to-date for services that, according to internal documents, consist largely of reformatting client-provided spreadsheets into ChatGPT prompts and delivering the outputs as PowerPoint presentations.

"Our AI-augmented methodology represents a paradigm shift in strategic consulting," said Senior Partner Robert Hastings, who declined to specify which AI tools the firm employs or whether McKinsey has developed any proprietary models. "We provide the critical human element: knowing which questions to ask."

Clients interviewed expressed satisfaction with the arrangement. "We simply don't have the internal expertise to use AI effectively," explained Samantha Chen, Chief Strategy Officer at a multinational retailer that paid McKinsey $4.2 million for a three-month engagement. "They have consultants who went to Harvard."

A leaked internal memo suggests McKinsey associates now spend an average of 11 minutes per client deliverable, down from 14 hours in the pre-AI era. Partner compensation, however, has increased proportionally to the time saved rather than decreased.

The firm announced plans to expand the practice, hiring 2,000 additional consultants whose primary qualification appears to be a willingness to maintain earnest eye contact while discussing "machine learning integration" and "neural network optimization."

When asked whether clients could achieve identical results by purchasing a $20 monthly ChatGPT subscription, Hastings smiled politely and suggested the question revealed a fundamental misunderstanding of value creation in professional services.