HUMAIN and McKinsey to collaborate on delivering AI transformations in Saudi Arabia
HUMAIN, a Saudi AI company backed by the Public Investment Fund, has entered into a strategic collaboration with McKinsey & Company, one of the world’s most prestigious management consulting firms.
Launched in May 2025, HUMAIN builds full-stack artificial intelligence infrastructure solutions, including data centers, cloud platforms, and large language models. The company also develops and deploys AI applications across sectors such as government, energy, finance, and manufacturing to support Saudi Arabia’s ambitious digital transformation and AI agenda.
The collaboration with McKinsey & Company will see the two organizations work together to support enterprises in the Kingdom in driving AI adoption, building the skills and capabilities required to scale usage, and translating AI deployment into tangible improvements in performance, cost efficiency, and revenue generation.
On McKinsey’s side, the work will be delivered by its management consultants, who bring deep transformation and industry expertise, and its AI engineers, who operate under the QuantumBlack brand. McKinsey will focus on identifying high-impact opportunities and reshaping how work is performed, while QuantumBlack will design and deploy AI solutions.
HUMAIN will, in turn, provide the localized AI infrastructure and applications needed to embed these solutions at scale. Where required to support implementation, HUMAIN and McKinsey may also engage other partners within HUMAIN’s broader ecosystem, including consultancies and system integrators.
“Capturing meaningful value from AI requires world-class technology. But it also demands rethinking how work gets done, building new capabilities, and embedding AI into core processes. This collaboration aims to help organizations in Saudi Arabia make that shift,” said Tom Isherwood, senior partner and co-leader of McKinsey’s technology work across the Middle East, Africa, and Central Asia.
A rare public client acknowledgment
For McKinsey, publicly announcing a client collaboration anywhere in the world is highly uncommon, as the firm is known for maintaining strict confidentiality around its relationships. And while McKinsey has worked extensively with PIF and its wider ecosystem for years, this marks the first time it has gone on record so explicitly about a relationship of this nature.
McKinsey’s decision to do so in this case – and to openly describe itself as “proud” of the strategic partnership – signals both the scale of the opportunity and its long-term commitment to Saudi’s sovereign wealth fund.
Founded in 1926, McKinsey & Company is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading strategy consulting firms, a position it also commands in the Middle East. Over the past decade, the firm has broadened its capabilities beyond traditional strategy work into areas such as implementation, digital transformation, and artificial intelligence.
“Together with McKinsey, we look forward to helping organizations move from experimentation to enterprise-wide transformation, embedding AI into core operations,” said Tareq Amin, CEO of HUMAIN. “By activating our full AI stack across data centers, compute, models, and applications, we are driving measurable results and unlocking sustained economic value across sectors.”
From ambition to scale and measurable impact
The partnership comes months after a McKinsey study found that while AI adoption in the Gulf region is already widespread – with 84% of respondents reporting that their organizations have adopted AI, up from 62% in 2023 – most have not yet fully embedded it into workflows and core processes to generate material enterprise-level value.
The authors describe the next phase of AI as closing the gap between strategy and execution, with a focus on scaling successful use cases and delivering measurable business outcomes. “Indeed, AI’s next chapter is about scaling what works,” concluded Amin.
