IBM executive ditches prep calls entirely, hands meeting research to an AI agent he named after himself.

The Summary

  • Dave McCann, global managing partner at IBM Consulting, built "Digital Dave", an AI agent that preps him for client meetings by scanning his calendar and drafting 10-point briefings for each one
  • The agent eliminates 30-minute pre-meeting calls with his team, saving roughly five hours weekly across 10 client meetings
  • McCann now uses reclaimed time to see more clients instead of prepping for existing ones

The Signal

This is what agent adoption looks like when the rubber meets the road. Not a chatbot answering customer service tickets. Not a coding assistant. An executive-level agent that replaced an entire workflow: the pre-meeting prep call.

McCann's agent pulls from internal IBM data, external market intelligence, account details, and project status. It delivers context without human gatekeepers. The old model required a team member to compile a briefing document, then schedule a 30-minute call to walk McCann through it. Now that entire process runs automated. The human work isn't "assisted." It's gone.

The economics are blunt. McCann manages thousands of clients across IBM's 150,000-person consulting arm. Five hours saved weekly compounds fast at that scale. But the real shift is what he does with the time. He's not taking longer lunches. He's seeing more clients. The agent didn't make him more efficient at the same job. It changed the shape of the job itself.

This started as an internal hackathon project last fall. That timeline matters. Nine months from prototype to production use by a global managing partner. That's the velocity of agent deployment inside organizations that actually build software. IBM isn't waiting for the agent economy. They're already living in it.

The Implication

If you're in professional services, consulting, or any client-facing role where prep work eats hours, this is your bellwether. The question isn't whether agents can handle research and briefing synthesis. McCann already proved they can. The question is whether your firm is building them or waiting for someone to sell you a watered-down version in 18 months. The gap between those two paths is competitive advantage measured in billable hours and client capacity.

Source: Business Insider Tech