- The Big Four are competing to develop the best AI solutions.
- Deloitte and EY just launched into the next phase of competition — AI agents to work alongside employees.
- Agentic AI could reshape consultancies’ business model.
The Big Four professional services firms are running their own AI race.
Deloitte, EY, PwC, and KPMG have been investing heavily in automation and AI for several years, competing to build the best solutions for their clients and optimize operations in-house. Innovation by the Big Four, with their hundreds of thousands of employees, sets an example to businesses around the world.
Now, they’re onto what tech industry players often call the third wave of AI: agentic AI. It revolves around intelligent systems, or “agents,” that can complete tasks or make decisions without human input. Where AI chatbots just respond to questions, AI agents can take action.
Last week, Deloitte and EY announced new agentic AI platforms, both built in collaboration with Nvidia.
Deloitte’s platform, Zora AI, provides clients with a selection of “intelligent digital workers” or agents that can perceive, reason, and act to complete tasks autonomously, Deloitte said in a press release.
The platform will act as a “digital workforce to change the way work gets done,” Deloitte said.
Deloitte’s finance team is already using the platform, and the consulting firm plans to give thousands of employees access to Zora AI by the end of the year.
Zora AI agents will support Deloitte employees with financial tasks, such as expense and invoice management, analysis of sales and performance trends, and the optimization of working capital requirements. The platform will be expanded to support other functions including procurement, sales and marketing, and customer services.
On the same day, EY introduced the EY.ai Agentic Platform, an agentic AI platform that will initially be used by 80,000 workers from the firm’s tax division. They’ll have access to 150 tax agents who will assist with tasks like data collection, document analysis and review, and income and indirect tax compliance.
‘Liberate thousands of hours’
Deloitte and EY touted that agentic AI would be both helpful for workers and transformative in the workplace.
Jason Girzadas, Deloitte’s US CEO, said Agentic AI represented the beginning of “the autonomous enterprise era” and would transform work and business models.
The firm said Zora AI would reduce the finance team’s costs by 25%, increase productivity by 40%, and “liberate thousands of hours of effort a year.”
Raj Sharma, EY’s global managing partner for growth and innovation, similarly praised agentic AI’s potential in a press release, saying that it is “fundamentally transforming business operations.”
Having actionable insights provided by this kind of technology “will impact whether businesses succeed or fall behind,” Sharma said.
This combined workforce of tax professionals and AI agents will aim to surpass 3 million tax compliance cases and redefine more than 30 million tax processes in the next year.
EY told BI that prior testing with an EY tax model demonstrated improved answer quality, achieving 86% accuracy compared to a generic model.
Changing the business model
Before achieving the vast transformational potential that proponents promise AI agents will deliver, Big Four firms and other businesses must first work out how to manage the new digital class of workers and how best to integrate new solutions into their business models.
At the World Economic Forum in January, EY’s Sharma told BI the power of AI agents is forcing the firm to reconsider its commercial model.
Instead of charging clients based on the hours and resources EY might spend on a project, Sharma said AI agents may call for a “service-as-a-software” approach where clients pay based on outcome.
Deloitte did not respond to BI’s questions about how the agents would affect its workforce. In a Wednesday panel at Nvidia’s GTC conference about empowering the federal workforce with AI, Deloitte principal Jillian Wanner said the consulting industry as a whole is being “disrupted” amid AI transformations.
“It is no longer acceptable at Deloitte to not take an engineering first mindset,” Wanner, who helps lead AI staff development at Deloitte, said. As the industry shifts, Deloitte employees need to act as “technologists and engineers first,” and “consultants second.”
David Rowlands, KPMG’s global head of AI, told BI that the firm is weaving AI agents into the way it delivers services for clients, using them as “innovative digital team-mates working closely with our brilliant people in Audit, Tax and Advisory.”
KPMG
Rowlands said that KPMG is working with its technology partners to create agentic solutions around customer service, quality, insight, reporting, assurance, and efficiency.
“Soon we will be working side-by-side with an agentic workforce that is well-trained, fast, flush with intelligence — IQ and EQ — one that ignores siloes, borders, politics and never sleeps,” a KPMG spokesperson added.
PwC is also working to establish how agentic AI fits in with the firm’s operations. Umang Paw, PwC UK’s chief technology officer, told BI that the focus is on how it can “enhance operational efficiency, transform customer experiences, and drive revenue growth and profitability.”
Paw added that PwC advises clients about the “transformative impacts” of agentic AI on their workforce and said that “trust, responsible AI and associated controls are built in from the outset.”
Internally, the firm has already built and deployed agents “for data ingestion, investigation and cleansing” and has an “agentic framework for communicating with customers in sophisticated ways,” said Bivek Sharma, PwC’s chief AI officer.
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