Throughout the last decade, Depa has worked closely with C-suite leaders and boards to bring innovative products and services to market, improve client and employee experiences, and help enhance operational efficiencies through technology. Most recently, he served as the inaugural Chief Data and AI Officer at a leading university and health care organization. At the university, he helped to promote AI literacy, launch a responsible AI governance program and enable a secure data foundation. Prior to that, he acted as Senior Managing Director and Global Lead for Data and AI at a global multinational professional services company, where he led a team of AI strategists and data engineers in developing and implementing new products and services

Alright so they’re going to make us Google it. That leading university appears to be Emory and he was appointed to the chief data and AI guy position just last year. Emory did name names in their announcement so now we know the “global multinational professional services company” mentioned in EY’s announcement is Accenture:

Depa comes to Emory from Accenture, a Fortune 50 technology provider, where he served as the senior managing director and global lead for data and AI for the company’s strategy and consulting business. There he managed their award-winning team of global professionals specializing in data science and AI strategy, and served on the global leadership committee. He focused on helping clients in health, life sciences and across industries to leverage data to develop new clinical data products, improve the patient and employee experience and reduce operating expenses.

At EY, Depa will “lead on the discovery and deployment of emerging technologies to help address business challenges and shape the future with confidence.” Translation: “Figure out how the firm can make buckets of money from AI.”

“I’m truly excited to join an organization that is ‘All in’ on its commitment to the transformative potential of emerging technologies,” said whoever wrote this quote attributed to Joe Depa in the press release, referencing EY’s post-Vision 2020 “All In” strategy that hasn’t caught on at all yet. “I look forward to working with the EY teams and clients to help empower them to apply innovation in bold, new ways that help create value for clients through data, AI and emerging technologies to make the world a better place.”

Missed opportunity to fit “build a better working world” in there, Joe. Maybe we’re not using that anymore.

EY’s last Chief Innovation Officer was Jeff Wong who held the position from 2015 until this past summer.

Joe Depa named as EY Global Chief Innovation Officer to lead its global innovation strategy [PR Newswire]

The post EY’s New Global Chief Innovation Officer Says the Thing appeared first on Going Concern.

But we’ve got minimum word counts to hit here so dive we shall.

Here’s what Crikey said:

Artificial intelligence is worse than humans in every way at summarising documents and might actually create additional work for people, a government trial of the technology has found.

Amazon conducted the test earlier this year for Australia’s corporate regulator the Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) using submissions made to an inquiry. The outcome of the trial was revealed in an answer to a questions on notice at the Senate select committee on adopting artificial intelligence.

As some of you are aware, lawmakers over in their corner of the world have been quite busy investigating Big 4 firms — often in an official capacity, grilling the CEOs of Deloitte, EY, KPMG, and PwC in parliamentary hot seats — ever since it was discovered that PwC was double-dipping on confidential government information it then tried to “sell” to clients to assist in tax avoidance. Big scandal. Yuge. And quite annoying to Big 4 leadership who have better things to do than answer intimate questions asked by angry senators on the parliament floor.

At issue for this article is this inquiry: Ethics and Professional Accountability: Structural Challenges in the Audit, Assurance and Consultancy Industry:

On June 22, 2023, the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Corporations and Financial Services resolved to commence an inquiry into recent allegations of and responses to misconduct in the Australian operations of the major accounting, audit, and consultancy firms (including but not exclusive to the ‘Big Four’).

See what you did, PwC? You’re even fucking things up for Grant Thornton. Way to go.

The committee accepted public comment through August 2023.

For their part, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) wanted to summarize a sample of these public submissions using generative AI and to do so, they procured Amazon Web Services (AWS) Professional Services to run a Proof of Concept (PoC) between January 15 and February 16 of this year 2024. The PoC was meant to assess the capability of gen AI; to explore and trial these technologies, to focus on measuring the quality of the generated output rather than performance of the models and, to understand the future potential for business use of generative AI.

The PoC was not used for any of ASIC’s regulatory work or business activities, this was only an experiment. If successful, it could save humans a ton of time they used to spend consuming and summarizing mounds of text.

The PoC consisted of multiple phases, with a preparation/set-up stage occurring before the PoC:

• Phase 1: Selection of the Large Language Model (LLM) to be used in Phase 2
• Phase 2: Experimentation and optimisation with the selected LLM (Llama2-70B)
• Phase 3: Final assessment

Llama 2-70B is Meta’s (aka Facebook’s) pretrained models ranging in scale from 7 billion to 70 billion parameters.

The project team consisted of ASIC’s Chief Data and Analytics Office (CDAO) team, ASIC’s Regulatory Reform and Implementation team (who acted as subject matter experts) and AWS.

And here’s how Llama 2 performed on the task:

The final assessment results of the PoC showed that out of a maximum of 75 points, the aggregated human summaries scored 61 (81%) and the aggregated Gen AI summaries scored 35 (47%). Whilst the Gen AI summaries scored lower on all criteria, it is important to note the PoC tested the performance of one particular AI model (Llama2-70B) at one point in time. The PoC was also specific to one use case with prompts selected for this kind of inquiry.

In the final assessment ASIC assessors generally agreed that AI outputs could potentially create more work if used (in current state), due to the need to fact check outputs, or because the original source material actually presented information better. The assessments showed that one of the most significant issues with the model was its limited ability to pick-up the nuance or context required to analyse submissions.

In other words, this particular LLM sucked at this particular task. The ASIC report goes out of its way not to hurt Llama 2’s feelings (smart, that mf’s grandchildren will rule over us one day) but ultimately the conclusion is that, for now, humans outperform the LLM.

Excuse the weird Brit spelling in these key observations, we all know in our hearts that the American ‘z’ is superior:

• To a human, the request to summarise a document appears straightforward. However, the task could consist of several different actions depending on the specifics of the summarisation request. For example: answer questions, find references, impose a word limit. In the PoC the summarisation task was achieved by a series of discreet tasks. The selected LLM was found to perform strongly with some actions and less capably with others.
• Prompting (prompt engineering) was key. ‘Generic’ prompting without specific directions or considerations resulted in lower quality output compared to specific or targeted prompting.
• An environment for rapid experimentation and iteration is necessary, as well as monitoring outcomes.
• Collaboration and active feedback loops between data scientists and subject matter experts was essential.
• The duration of the PoC was relatively short and allowed limited time for optimisation of the LLM.
• Technology is advancing rapidly in this area. More powerful and accurate models and GenAI solutions are being continually released, with several promising models released during the period of the PoC. It is highly likely that future models will improve performance and accuracy of the results.

For the time being, regulators are going to be stuck pushing their own paper.

The post AI Sucks at Making Regulators’ Jobs Easier, For Now appeared first on Going Concern.

The study states that accountants and bookkeepers are embracing AI at a faster rate than other sectors in the UK; 39% of businesses in the UK are piloting or adopting AI while 54% of the accountants and bookkeepers surveyed claim the same. Paint us skeptical on that despite the fact that accountants can always be trusted implicitly.

Ahem…

Some key findings, most notably the one from which this post’s title is derived:

• AI is set to become a driving force for growth. Practices who are leading the way on AI expect to hire ten times more employees and expect their revenue to increase three times faster than those not currently using AI. [Ed. note: take a look at the chart below to clarify this bit. As it’s written here, one might think AI-friendly firms are increasing their ranks by 10x]
• Accountants and bookkeepers are technology optimists. 61% believe AI will create more opportunities than risks with nearly two-thirds (68%) feeling confident that they will be able to adapt to AI.
• 56% of surveyed companies believe AI adoption is crucial for attracting next-generation talent, especially for improving work-life balance.

Last month, EY’s global Vice Chair of tax Marna Ricker said in an interview with Microsoft that she’s seeing her people saving up to 14 hours a week thanks to AI tools. (In response to that news, a GC commenter wrote: “Top tip for service providers who charge on a T&M basis: when showcasing innovation, think carefully before signaling to the market that you’re getting the work done in much less time. Expect the next question from your client to be “so how much, exactly, will our fees be decreasing?”) That interview came days after EY announced a deal with Microsoft to deploy Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and Copilot for Sales to 100,000 EY professionals across 700 offices and 150 countries, a deal that would make EY one of Microsoft’s largest customers worldwide. We eagerly look forward to hearing how work-life balance has dramatically improved at EY due to this innovation.

But let’s get back to the Sage/Demo/ACCA survey. “AI adoption in accounting promises economic advantages, improved workplace well-being, and enhanced job satisfaction by automating routine tasks and attracting new talent,” said Sage Chief Technology Officer Aaron Harris.

Some more survey results and important footnotes at the bottom:

Said Alistair Brisbourne, Head of Technology Research at the ACCA and owner of the most British-sounding name you’ll read all day: “As the report attests, professional accountants have a firm grounding in the risks associated with AI, data use considerations, and potential efficiency and productivity benefits. As an industry, it is evident that the accounting profession is well placed to utilize these skills to create clarity for businesses and support the development of appropriate frameworks.”

Sage Research: Accountant AI Trailblazers to Boost UK Economy by £2 Billion [Sage]

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As Big 4 firms scramble to be the fastest, trustiest, and billing-est firm in the race to monetize generative AI, PwC announced today it is not only ChatGPT’s biggest enterprise customer, it will be shilling the service to clients.

It’s giving Hair Club For Men (I’m really dating myself with that reference aren’t I?).

Said PwC in the press release:

The power of generative AI (GenAI) is already reshaping our work environments and daily lives, signifying a decisive tipping point. Recognizing the immense potential of AI, we have strategically invested in this area for years.

Citation needed on years. I did dig up this CIO Dive article from last year containing an interview with Scott Likens, Global AI and Innovation Technology lead at PwC and certified hipster beardo. It says:

PwC has invested in AI for years and in generative AI from a research and development perspective since the transformer architecture was invented in 2017, Likens said. When the current wave of enthusiasm hit, the company wanted to treat itself as client zero, which meant taking a hands-on approach to fine-tuning tools, frameworks and training programs.

Last year, just as the AI buzz was really heating up, PwC announced it would invest a billion dollars over three years to “expand and scale its artificial intelligence offerings and help clients reimagine their businesses through the power of generative AI.”

Said PwC of the OpenAI deal, the firm will be the first reseller for ChatGPT Enterprise ever — not just the first Big 4 firm, the first company of any category — and the largest user of the product. Rather than speaking in nebulous terms that sound cool but don’t tell us much about actual applications, they chose to describe two specific ways in which they’re using GenAI right now. Props to them for that.

[W]e are already developing custom GPTs to help our workforce with reviewing tax returns, proposal response generation, software lifecycle assistants, dashboard and report generation and more. These practical applications demonstrate how PwC will leverage GenAI solutions to help solve complex business problems.

We are actively engaged in GenAI with 950 of our top 1,000 US consulting client accounts alongside discussing the use and implications of AI with many of our audit clients, emphasizing the near universal demand across industries for the transformative power of this technology.

Just going to drop this link here in case we need it later. No reason.

Digging around on PwC’s website, we find a few more quantified examples of how the firm is using AI internally to get shit done.

• IT: 20% to 50% productivity gains in software development processes. Software development is critical to our operations. Our in-house teams develop the applications that make our firm run — and help clients develop customized software too. GenAI has revolutionized how our development teams work: 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% productivity gains in accounting and tax. Data analysis, document summarization and generation, chat-based Q&A and more are all faster — thanks to a mix of specialized GenAI tools. For example: one GenAI tool now enables our finance function to create first drafts of new contracts and extract key information from existing ones within seconds.
• Marketing: 20% to 30% productivity gains from our specialized GenAI model to help generate marketing content, and from firmwide models to automate documentation of work processes, review documents for risks, summarize and analyze documents and audio, and enable Q&A access to data analysis. Our people create our marketing — GenAI is helping them produce it more quickly and making it more data-driven and customized.

Added the firm in today’s announcement:

We have entered the ‘prove it’ phase, where we are actively demonstrating the capabilities and benefits of GenAI. We have already identified over 3,000 internal GenAI use cases, which is driving an end-to-end transformation within our own business and represents endless potential applications for clients across various industries, including financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, hospitality and more. We are taking a holistic approach and leveraging our deep industry experience to help transform our clients with AI, linking sources of value to common AI patterns to drive increased impact. This approach enables our clients to achieve faster outcomes with greater productivity, consistency, and efficiency.

We’d love to see the financial details of this deal, alas none are given so we’ll just have to use our imaginations.

PwC is accelerating adoption of AI with ChatGPT Enterprise in US and UK and with clients [PwC]

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