A central challenge for Generative AI adoption so far has been integration. Most human employees don’t just use the same webpage for all of their work; they read some emails in one program, then consult some information in another, then type their results in a third. GenAI systems today can perform intermediate “thinking” about the data, but it can’t directly access the different software systems – it relies on people to move the inputs/data/results between them.
That’s part of why it’s exciting to see management consulting firm PwC (formerly PricewaterhouseCoopers) commit $1B and thousands of man-hours to generative AI. Not only do they help some of the world’s biggest companies with their corporate strategies, but they also offer integration support for deploying information technologies. Their involvement in GenAI solves two problems: helping customers discover where GenAI offers business value, then actually building the GenAI workflows for them.
As part of that $1B investment in GenAI, PwC recently announced the largest partnership to date with OpenAI. This partnership enables PwC’s US and UK employees to access the latest OpenAI models, as well as allowing PwC to become a channel reseller of OpenAI technology. This partnership – between the world’s best AI firm and one of the world’s top management consulting firms – has the potential to accelerate GenAI adoption around the world.
Let’s dig in!
PwC Accelerates Productivity with Generative AI
Recognizing the potential for generative AI to transform the world of business, PwC committed $1B to working with the technology back in 2023. At that point, their goal was two-fold. First, since theirs is a very information-heavy business, they wanted to use GenAI internally to transform their own organization’s productivity for the better. More importantly, though, their teams would develop their own skills with the technology, allowing them to more effectively bring GenAI to their customers’ businesses in the future.
With less than a year of generative AI use under their belt, the results have already been a wild success. After identifying over 3,000 internal use cases for generative AI, they have developed custom GPT’s to help with an astonishing range of tasks, including “reviewing tax returns, proposal response generation, software lifecycle assistants, dashboard and report generation and more.” One of these GPT’s, called ChatPwC and built on OpenAI’s GPT-4 model, is being used by 100k employees globally. Most critically, employees using these tools have reported 20-40% increases in productivity. Amazing!
PwC Bringing Generative AI to Their Clients
In the same news release, PwC notes that they “are actively engaged in GenAI with 950 of our top 1,000 US consulting client accounts.” There’s a major reason for this: PwC’s “AI Jobs Barometer” tool has calculated that “sectors most exposed to AI are experiencing nearly 5X higher labor productivity growth than sectors less exposed to AI.”
So far, PwC has seen the greatest adoption primarily among healthcare and financial services firms, as well as those that have a significant customer service component. (Klarna and MavenAGI are two businesses that have also demonstrated great success using generative AI for customer service.) Importantly, the use of generative AI hasn’t been about laying off workforce, but rather expanding the business while controlling payroll growth. PwC notes that GenAI’s best use is helping, “the company grow business on the employee base that it already has without needing to add more people.”
PwC Brings Generative AI Integration
The most notable part of the announcement, though, is the establishment of PwC as a channel reseller for OpenAI. Previously OpenAI had been selling their products directly to end-users – which is fine for a start-up, but sales tend to scale linearly with staffing in this model, and time for integration and support becomes limited as the company becomes more successful. Opening the door for channel partnership offers the benefit of greater sales to an established customer base without adding direct headcount. The OpenAI/PwC partnership creates a great synergy for the two companies, where OpenAI offers the tech and a cut of the sales, and PwC leverages their relationships and integration capabilities to offer direct, realized value for their customers.
Bret Greenstein, partner and “generative AI leader” at PwC, stated the goal very well:
[PwC has been building tools around the product itself] “but as the technology stack gets better, we can buy versus build more things. We can then focus more on outcomes, transformation, workflow, use cases, and business process, and less on assembling APIs to build an experience for our employees,”
Integration a Central Part of Generative AI’s Future
Of course, PwC isn’t the only management consulting company to see the potential benefits of generative AI for their customers. WSJ noted that “Accenture, KPMG and Ernst & Young have also invested billions in generative AI to expand their work with clients through the technology.”
This investment is a boon for the consulting companies, the AI companies, and their customers. While AI is terrific off-the-shelf, it’s even better when it’s helping accelerate whole workflows – and these companies are helping make that happen.
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