- David Rowlands, Head of AI at KPMG, is helping the company transform for an AI-driven future.
- He spoke with Business Insider about the obstacles companies face when trying to do the same.
- Don’t focus on single-use cases of AI and don’t cherry-pick your data, he advised.
KPMG, one of Big four consulting firms, has integrated AI into all its operations and advises global businesses on how to do the same.
All employees in the company’s three divisions (accounting, tax and consulting) have the opportunity to use AI. Everyone has access to some form of GPT and around a fifth of the global workforce has a Copilot license, David Rowlands, global head of AI at KPMG, told Business Insider.
“What they were already doing, they can now do faster,” he said in an interview.
But the vast majority of companies are still on the adoption path, and clients who use KPMG are still thinking about how to get it off the ground and get the data, Rowlands said.
Customer concerns about AI have evolved over time: first, it was about ethics, hallucinations and trust; Over the last four or five months, it was about realizing the business case and allowing staff to adopt it; and then it’s the question of data and how organizations differentiate themselves through their data and protect it.
BI spoke with Rowlands about KPMG’s own adoption journey and how the firm advises businesses as they deepen their use of AI.
David Rowlands was appointed KPMG’s Head of AI in December 2023. KPMG
One of the biggest hurdles businesses need to overcome is the focus on single use cases for AI systems.
Many companies deploy an AI agent to sit on a curated database and select data to make quick recommendations to a human operator, he explained. But the systems must be reusable.
“What you need to think about is integrating AI into your operating model,” he said. “At KPMG, we want to take people beyond use cases, because a one-off piece of technology, a one-off use case, hasn’t been a particularly strong business case.”
Clarity of the business case is also the best way to achieve a return on investment, he added.
The question of returns is a hot topic among CEOs as billions of dollars continue to flow into AI infrastructure. A few economists and analysts warned that money was being wasted on hype, while others said the rate of improvement was slowing and AI hits a wall.
KPMG buys into the hype. In 2023, the company announced it would invest $2 billion in artificial intelligence and cloud services in partnership with Microsoft over the next five years and expected the strategy to generate more than $12 billion income over this period.
In November, he announced a $100 million investment in Google Cloudwhich he says could generate $1 billion in growth.
Rowlands said it’s difficult to get clients to see the broader impact when they can’t see an immediate return on investment. But he said the benefits would come through improvements in growth, quality and agility: “We are already seeing that a co-pilot system saves around 40 minutes per week. »
As of mid-2024, some KPMG surveys on returns were “ambivalent”, but they are now “getting anecdotal evidence of return on investment”, Rowlands said. This time next year, he added, operational and financial directors will be positive about the returns they will achieve.
Data will differentiate your business
How to approach data is another obstacle for customers on their AI journey, Rowlands said.
“Organizations will be increasingly differentiated by the data they have,” he said. This requires paying more attention to where your data is, who owns it, where it is generated, and how you keep it up to date.
Data will only become more integrated as we enter the next stage of AI evolution, Rowlands added. He hopes that in the next 12 months, multi-agent models – a group of specialized AI agents who coordinate to achieve a collective goal – will quickly become a reality.
“This is where AI is going to start to have a big impact on solving some of the biggest problems, such as decarbonization,” he said.
Preparing the workforce for these changes is part of responsible AI implementation, Rowlands said.
KPMG held a “24 Hours of AI” training session in January this year. The key message was that everyone should know how to use AI to solve their problems and be reliable and innovative in its use in front of customers. The company continues to train its staff on data curation, data management, and rapid authoring.
Rowlands does not deny that AI will have a “profound transformational impact” on the professional services sector. He said there would be job turnover, as happened with the Internet, but that would not diminish the consultants’ purpose.
“We’re not really thinking about replacing jobs. It’s more about improving individuals and roles. And those who use AI well are more successful than those who don’t.
“Our consultants, as they always have, will increasingly strive to ensure that our clients achieve valuable results from our work.”