Deloitte Australia to roll out AI platform in ‘productivity’ pitch
Audit and consulting giant Deloitte Australia will activate a generative AI platform across its business after trialling the system.
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Audit and consulting giant Deloitte Australia will roll out a generative AI platform across its business, after an initial trial of the system, in a move the firm expects will be its “most important business productivity tool” in years.
Deloitte said its MyAssist tool, the firm’s in-house generative AI platform, will be pushed out broadly across all business units coming on the back of a global restructure aimed at tilting the firm towards tech clients.
Generative AI platforms are capable of churning out content based on prompts from users.
Deloitte said the MyAssist platform had been designed to be scaled throughout the firm through the creation of AI-apps “that address specific business problems”.
Deloitte chief executive Adam Powick said the firm was rolling out generative AI platforms as part of a commitment to “upskilling and equipping everyone in our organisation to use generative AI to improve the speed and quality of work outcomes”.
“MyAssist is a sophisticated and secure generative AI platform which provides users with access to a number of different models and applications supporting common tasks like information research, analysis and evaluation, data handling and code development and testing,” Mr Powick said.
Deloitte said examples of use cases of its MyAssist platform included “personal productivity apps” which saw staff automate the completion of “multiple related tasks”.
This includes apps optimised for research, content drafting, code development, as general document chat capabilities.
“We want to be leaders in the impactful and responsible use of artificial intelligence and we see the rollout of our MyAssist platform as an important step in this journey,” Mr Powick said.
Deloitte’s rollout of the new AI platform comes after the firm’s trial with 1300 users.
The firm said this trial found users spent half their time on a “core set of common tasks”, which the platform had been “optimised to support”.
Deloitte National GenAI Lead Stu Scotis said the development of the MyAssist platform “showed us that we are more alike than we first thought”.
“We have a diverse business but we also know there are common activities embedded across really diverse functions,” he said.
“We wanted to develop a platform that helped all of our teams, so we focused on these common activities first.”
Mr Scotis said this showed Deloitte did “not need to solve for each activity in isolation”. “Instead we can scale solutions to provide quality outcomes for our clients and our people,” he said.
However, Mr Scotis said the firm acknowledged “human intelligence won’t be fully replaced by GenAI”. But he said AI had the capacity to accelerate productivity.
The move to roll out the AI platform comes as the consulting sector faces a slide in new work, with almost all major firms cutting headcount.
KPMG Australia announced $80m in cuts on Friday, which would see the firm slash 200 jobs, as part of a realignment of the firm towards digital platforms.
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Originally published as Deloitte Australia to roll out AI platform in ‘productivity’ pitch
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