Around the same time McKinsey was working alongside SCL, one of its Dubai-based senior partners, Enrico Benni, was seeking out people across the firm for a new potential Saudi assignment: to perform sentiment analysis in Arabic, one former employee said. McKinsey’s Saudi-based employees highlighted this work on their public profiles. One Saudi-based Elixir employee, Ahmad Alattas, listed “social media monitoring to conduct and study public sentiment analysis” among his jobs. Soon, this new line of work yielded results, but perhaps not the kind McKinsey had in mind.
