The potential of ChatGPT is immense and many companies are trying to take advantage of it. One of the latest is consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), which has announced a multi-million dollar investment to make the most of this technology.
1,000 million investment. As The Wall Street Journal indicates, PwC will invest $1 billion in this technology over the next three years. That investment includes collaboration agreements with Microsoft and OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT.
Integration everywhere. In Consultancy they intend to use ChatGPT to automate some aspects of their tax, auditing, and consulting services. To achieve this, they will hire experts in the field, train their staff and also propose to acquire companies developing artificial intelligence solutions.
more efficiency. Mohammad Kande, a director at PwC, indicated in the WSJ how once these models are trained and evaluated to adjust to their objectives, he envisions them being used to quickly write reports, comply with documents (‘ compliance’), or analyze and evaluate trading strategies. “It’s all about using generative AI to run businesses more efficiently. Adoption of this technology is critical,” Kande said.
Sign up other advisors as well. Other companies like KPMG or Ernst & Young are also investing in this sector. Intuit, the makers of TurboTax, are building their own AI model for financial management, and for that process, they’re training the model on years of interactions with their corporate clients.
It will be easy to generate reports. One of the most frequent and complex tasks of analysts at these companies involves the preparation of all kinds of reports. According to Rowan Curran of Forrester Research, models such as GPT-4 can be used to explore unstructured and semi-structured data, which would create those reports with “much less effort for human auditors.”
do more with less. The WSJ cites a survey of 500 IT company managers conducted by Enterprise Technology Research (ETR). According to them, 53% of them said they were evaluating, using, or considering reserving resources for ChatGPT, which is something unheard of among technology providers. Eric Bradley, an analyst at ETR, said that “heavily investing in generative AI makes a lot of sense for organizations that are trying to do more with less.”
But we’ll have to see what ChatGPT does. However, these companies know that these models make mistakes. Mark McDonald, an analyst at Gartner, pointed out that the use of generative AI in areas such as tax preparation will require verification of those documents by a human professional. “Reference to an algorithm as a justification for tax decisions is not an excuse that auditors accept,” he added.
Will AI Take Away Jobs? Mr. Kande further explained that PwC does not aim to replace its employees with generative AI, but the idea is to optimize their jobs by automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks. “We have 65,000 employees in America,” he insisted, “and we’re not going to leave anyone behind. It’s going to be a team sport.” The truth is that others like Accenture recently announced 19,000 layoffs, and it remains to be seen whether this type of strategy impacts the PwC workforce or other consultants.
