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Andreas Ess

PartnerZurich

Helps clients realize value from advanced analytics, from strategy setting to realizing organizational and technical change

Andreas coleads QuantumBlack, a McKinsey company, in Switzerland, which hosts McKinsey’s team of data scientists and data engineers. His work focuses on helping clients scale advanced analytics across industries such as machinery and technology, with a special passion for the consumer space. The range of topics covers the entire chain from setting an aspiration to identifying the most impactful applications or designing supporting technology platforms and operating models as well as selecting necessary change interventions.

During his ten years at McKinsey, Andreas has worked with organizations across Europe, Asia, and the United States to develop and deploy analytics solutions. He always begins by identifying which business decisions need to be improved, such as churn reduction, price setting, or promotion mix. As an example, for a European retailer, this resulted in more than one percentage point improvement in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization.

Within McKinsey, he heads the development of retail-analytics assets, including a modular-code library developed and maintained by QuantumBlack to help our teams deliver impact faster. This combines his knowledge and passion for retail, analytics, and software development. In addition to his work within the retail sector, Andreas publishes on this and other related topics, which includes recent articles for the firm’s State of Grocery Retail report series in 2021 and 2022.

Before joining McKinsey, Andreas worked in software engineering and developed computer vision algorithms for autonomous vehicles during his PhD at ETH Zurich.

PUBLISHED WORK

LLM to ROI: How to scale gen AI in retail,” McKinsey & Company, August 2024

Pushing granular decisions through analytics,” McKinsey & Company, May 2022

How advanced analytics can fuel growth,” The State of Grocery Retail 2021, McKinsey & Company, March 2021

PAST EXPERIENCE

Texas Instruments Incorporated
Software engineer

Omicron
Software engineer

EDUCATION

ETH Zurich
PhD, computer vision
MS, computer science