How PwC is Making the Ultimate Case to Use Generative AI for Business Value

GenAI is at a tipping point. Though we’re wrestling with a lot of potential, stakeholders want to see strategic investments, clear ROI, and developed strategies to prove the technology’s market value.

PwC, one of America’s Big Four accounting firms, has strategically invested in genAI for years to transform operations. PwC leverages this technology to help support clients in reinventing their businesses and delivering better outcomes by generating richer insights, driving more productivity, and developing new products and services that build greater trust with their stakeholders.

The field of AI is advancing so quickly that many experts are hesitant to even speculate about potential future use cases, noting that literally anything could be on the table. The unrestrained growth of AI signals a seismic shift, one that will leave no industry untouched. Although these open us up to a world of new possibilities, leaders need to be fully aware of how they can ready their organizations while also equipping employees with the right skills and tools to harness them correctly.  

Building an AI Factory and alliance relationships

To make deployment and execution fast and repeatable, Pwc has built an AI factory—an operating model designed to continually identify new use cases, set priorities and scale up patterns of deployment across multiple tasks and functions. By systematising different talents, capabilities, and processes, the team aims to build new solutions and find new ways to help the firm, and the clients reinvent work. 

Until now, the AI factory has enabled the firm to identify thousands of use cases and build hundreds of reusable GenAI solutions to accelerate its ability to achieve scale and value quickly.

PwC leverages alliance relationships with leading enterprise application vendors that are integrating GenAI capabilities into their products, including Adobe, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, and Workday. By tapping into the benefits offered by strategic collaboration, PwC strives to stay ahead of the curve, innovate faster, and operate more efficiently in today’s competitive market.

PwC is integrating GenAI capabilities into its own broad portfolio of products as well. The firm also collaborates with leading academic institutions and engages with policy organizations and regulators.

PwC to be largest customer of OpenAI’s enterprise product

Recently, this year in 2024, PwC unveiled its plans to integrate ChatGPT Enterprise, designed for large corporations, into its workforce. This rollout will encompass 75,000 employees in the US and 26,000 in the UK. As reported, the initiative will see over 100,000 licenses for the AI product being deployed within PwC. This is the latest advancement in the firm’s investment in AI, which enables the firm to scale AI capabilities across businesses to help drive accelerated impact for clients.

Through ChatGPT Enterprise, PwC’s US and UK workforces can gain access to the most powerful version of ChatGPT, along with enterprise-grade security and privacy. The team will also benefit from access to the latest tools, including OpenAI’s recently announced ChatGPT-4o model and new capabilities focused on voice and image.

At a time when business leaders across industries demand outcomes and business impact – and not just potential – PwC’s expanded relationship with OpenAI provides a playbook for companies looking to scale their AI infrastructure, apps, and services. 

Talking about the potential impact of AI on jobs, Bret Greenstein, partner and generative AI leader at PwC, emphasized that “tools like ChatGPT or similar generative AI assistants pose no threat to jobs. Instead, the aim is to leverage such technology to expand business operations without necessarily increasing headcount.”

Preparing everyone for the digital world

PwC’s research shows that technological change will likely severely disrupt or disappear one in three jobs in the next decade. This could affect almost half of all low-skilled jobs and a third of semi-skilled jobs. Already, there is a skills mismatch around the world, and millions of jobs are going unfilled. It is not possible for the existing hired people to fill the empty slots. The only option to address this issue is upskilling so that professionals gain the knowledge and skills they need in the digital age. 

Hence, PwC has started its upskilling journey in the US and is now developing plans to offer it to all of its people.  By upskilling, PwC aims to give employees the opportunities to gain the knowledge, tools and ability they need to use advanced and ever-changing technologies in the workplace and their daily lives.

Over the next four years, PwC is committing US$3bn to upskilling. This will primarily be invested in training its people and in technologies for supporting clients and communities.

Pulling real data on ROI across the business functions

Across PwC, it is found that people who regularly use AI tools demonstrate productivity gains in their business functions. With time saved, they can focus on more strategic work and bring more value to clients.  

Information Technology (IT): 20 to 50 percent productivity gains: The firm has seen huge gains in its software development processes. PwC’s in-house teams develop the applications that make the firm run — and help clients develop customized software, too.  The customized tools help synthesize data, complete and review code, generate documentation, conduct fast, granular troubleshooting (through root cause analysis), and more.

Finance: 20 to 40 percent productivity gains: AI tools have made data analysis, document summarization, and generation, chat-based Q&A, etc, much faster. For example, one GenAI tool now enables the finance function to create first drafts of new contracts and extract key information from existing ones within seconds.  

Marketing: 20 to 30 productivity gains: With the help of a specialized GenAI model, the marketing team is able to generate marketable content, automate documentation of work processes, and review, summarize, and analyze documents for further data analysis. 

PwC’s responsible AI framework

The Responsible AI (RAI) framework, developed by PwC, provides a practical solution to ensure effective stewardship of the outcomes. This technology-enabled toolkit consists of a range of flexible and scalable capabilities curated to enable and support the development and assessment of high-quality, explainable, transparent, and ethical AI applications.

The toolkit helps mitigate many of the foreseen or unforeseen risks associated with AI. It accelerates innovation and the potential to create value—which could be at stake if AI is implemented in the wrong way.  PwC believes that integrating the RAI toolkit with AI-related initiatives will enable businesses to accelerate innovation and realize their vision.

PwC is a pioneer and leader in responsible AI – delivering AI in a way that supports responsible and ethical use of AI technology and data. It’s no surprise that PwC has been recognized as a leader in AI by Gartner, IDC and Forrester.

In brief

The integration of generative AI into business processes is rapidly gaining traction. Consulting firms like PwC, have been early adopters, investing billions in generative AI to expand their work with clients. With a strategic approach, PwC is betting big on AI’s potential to bring transformation and success.