Lakshmi Varanasi
Lakshmi Varanasi tracks how artificial intelligence is reshaping the consulting business and the wider corporate economy, with a particular focus on how major firms deploy AI, measure its value, and reorganize work around it. She reports on business and technology for Business Insider, concentrating on AI and the consulting industry and how it is changing firms such as McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, Bain, and their peers. Her coverage sits at the intersection of strategy, talent, and emerging AI products, following the impact of new tools on consultants, developers, executives, and investors.
AI and the consulting business
Varanasi devotes much of her reporting to how AI is altering the economics and daily work of consulting firms.
In a series of stories on McKinsey and other major players, she examines how firms are rolling out AI agents, struggling to quantify their benefits, and grappling with what an “age of confusion” around AI value looks like inside large partnerships. Her pieces on McKinsey detail how AI is feeding into decisions about what counts as a “perfect” job candidate and how the firm is widening its view of desirable talent in an AI age. She extends this lens to other consultancies, reporting on EY’s talent chief to show how AI is reshaping the employee lifecycle, from recruitment through evaluations and promotions.
Across these stories, she uses executive interviews and internal criteria to show how AI-driven change plays out in hiring targets, performance expectations, and compensation discussions inside firms that advise the world’s biggest companies. Her coverage of Accenture’s AI transformation and the pressure it creates on the company’s stock further ties AI adoption to market performance and investor sentiment around consulting and services businesses.
Talent, careers, and the AI workforce
A recurring strand in Varanasi’s work is the way AI is transforming careers, both inside consulting and beyond. She reports on McKinsey’s evolving hiring criteria to show how traditional markers of excellence are being reassessed, and how candidates are now evaluated for their ability to work with AI tools and data-driven workflows. Her piece on McKinsey embracing a wider pool of talent in the AI age highlights how firms are looking beyond conventional backgrounds and reconsidering what skills matter for advisory work in a technology-heavy environment.
In her coverage of EY, she follows AI’s influence through the full employee lifecycle, explaining how recruitment, performance reviews, promotions, and long-term career paths are being reshaped by automation and analytics.
These stories often foreground the implications for individual workers and job seekers, showing how AI changes the experience of entering and progressing in high-status professional services roles. More broadly, she writes about careers and jobs around AI, situating consulting in a larger shift in the labor market that affects developers, non-technical employees, and early-career professionals.
AI models, startups, and the product ecosystem
Beyond consulting, Varanasi covers the AI product landscape, paying close attention to the gap between hype and actual usage.
She writes about which AI models developers really rely on, contrasting the “hottest” systems by reputation with the tools that see sustained adoption in practice. Her reporting on a mysterious free AI model that impresses developers despite its unknown origins illustrates her interest in the informal, fast-moving parts of the ecosystem where new capabilities can emerge outside major corporate labs. In a story on a fired OpenAI researcher’s 165-page essay about the next decade of AI, she uses GPT-4 to distill complex arguments, combining technical analysis with accessible explanation for a broader business audience.
She also follows the founder side of the industry, profiling a 20-year-old college dropout who built an AI assistant startup and tracing how such companies position themselves in a crowded market. Her piece on “vibe coding” chronicles a wave of startups raising billions to make software creation more intuitive for non-technical users, linking product design to capital flows and new user behaviors.
Varanasi’s coverage of Yang Zhilin and China’s Moonshot AI adds a global dimension, exploring the leaders and models behind China’s latest AI push. Taken together, these stories show her focus on the business models, funding, and usage patterns that define the emerging AI economy.
Executives and personalities around AI and tech
Varanasi frequently uses executive perspectives to anchor her reporting, combining strategic analysis with personal detail. Her profiles of figures such as Yang Zhilin situate individual leaders within competitive national and global AI races, explaining what their companies are building and why it matters. She also writes more personal pieces about prominent tech CEOs, including a feature on Nvidia’s Jensen Huang that steps away from products and finances to describe how he met and won over his wife. In these stories, she shows an interest in the motivations, relationships, and biographies behind corporate decision-makers, making AI and technology coverage feel grounded in human narratives.
Earlier in her career, she reported for outlets such as Slate, Politico, and Reveal, experience that informs her current mix of business, technology, and narrative storytelling at Business Insider.
4 more finance journalists.
Abigail Summerville
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Adekunle Agbetiloye
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Aimee Picchi
Aimee Picchi connects Social Security, retirement programs and economic policy directly to the financial security of ordinary Americans, showing how macro decisions hit household budgets. She is associate managing editor for CBS MoneyWatch at CBS News, covering business and personal finance with clear, accessible explanations of complex money issues. Her core beat is Social Security and retirement, interest rates and inflation, and how policy, markets and company strategies affect workers, retirees, savers and investors. She reports on benefit adequacy, looming Social Security cuts, COLA changes, Federal Reserve rate decisions, fuel costs, trade tensions and labor’s share of income, always framing coverage around pocketbook impacts. Her background includes retirement reporting fellowships, prior staff reporting on technology, media and business, an Institutional Investor book on affluent investors, and freelance work for national outlets. She also writes science fiction and fantasy and is a Nebula Award finalist.
Alex Harring
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