Alvarez & Marsal recruits Dorian Gaertner to lead new Digital Services practice
Global professional services firm Alvarez & Marsal has recruited former McKinsey partner Dorian Gaertner to lead a newly-launched digital services practice for Australia and Southeast Asia.
Gaertner crosses to Alvarez & Marsal as a managing director in Sydney after spending more than a decade and a half at McKinsey & Company, during which time he gained a Ph.D in artificial intelligence with Imperial College London.
The global consultancy said Gaertner’s appointment reflects its commitment to strengthening its market leadership in enterprise transformation and performance improvement for top-tier clients across its Australia and Southeast Asia business.
“Dorian’s appointment underscores A&M’s focus on leveraging AI to deliver tangible outcomes for our clients,” said regional leader Utsav Garg. “His deep expertise in digital transformation and AI, combined with his hands-on approach, aligns perfectly with A&M’s results-driven mindset, and we are thrilled to have Dorian lead our efforts in developing a leading digital practice in the region.”
Gaertner brings altogether more than two and a half decades of professional experience to A&M, including time spent at Fujitsu Labs in Silicon Valley and a Spanish AI research institute prior to joining McKinsey & Company in 2009, where he served a leader in the management consultancy’s technology practice McKinsey Digital.
Gaertner is credited during his time at McKinsey with delivering multi-billion-dollar AI and tech transformation projects and supporting more than 50 clients in Australia and globally operating in industries such as banking, telecommunications, mining, and retail, with digital strategy and AI-driven optimisation listed among his areas of expertise.
“A&M’s entrepreneurial culture, focus on deep expertise, and commitment to delivering tangible results for clients resonate deeply with my own approach to solving complex business challenges,” Gaertner stated. “I’m excited to join a firm that prioritises value creation and leverages technology to drive meaningful outcomes for clients across Southeast Asia and Australia.”
In making the announcement, A&M noted several other of the strategic hires with top-tier advisory experience the firm has made in recent years, including fellow former McKinsey partner Yuval Bar-Sela, MBB veteran Thomas Carlsen, and Timo Schmid and Nicholas Reid, who both joined from BCG, the latter in the early days as the firm stepped up its local ambitions from late 2022.
According to a discussion with the AFR, A&M’s A/NZ performance improvement practice leader Igor Sadimenko (who joined from Ernst & Young) says the consultancy is now on track to surpass $100 in revenues by the end of this year, with that figure expected to jump to $150 the following year alongside an ever-growing headcount of almost 500 professionals.
Also speaking to the publication on the regional launch of A&M’s ‘Digital and Technology Services (DTS)’ offering, Gaertner added; ‘The practice is still in its early stages, so there’s plenty to build, (but) we see across all markets that digital, technology and AI are part of up to 50 percent of our client engagements, and that will only grow from here.”
