As a leader in artificial intelligence settlements, PwC cooperates with OpenAI

If any article needs a PwC Chad image, it’s this one

As the Big Four firms strive to be the fastest, most trustworthy and highest-paying company in the race to monetize generative AI, PwC announced today that it is not only ChatGPT’s largest enterprise customer, but will be shilling the service to customers.

This gives Hair Club For Men (I really come across this reference, don’t I?).

PwC stated in a press release:

The power of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is already transforming our work environment and everyday life, marking a decisive turning point. Recognizing the enormous potential of artificial intelligence, we have been strategically investing in this area for years.

Citation required years. I dug out a CIO Dive article from last year that included an interview with Scott Likens, director of global AI and innovative technologies at PwC and a certified hipster with a beard. It speaks:

PwC has been investing in AI and generative AI from an R&D perspective for years since the invention of transformer architecture in 2017, Likens said. When the current wave of enthusiasm arrived, the company wanted to treat itself as customer zero, which meant taking a hands-on approach to fine-tuning tools, frameworks, and training programs.

Last year, as the buzz around AI really intensified, PwC announced it would invest billion dollars over three years to “expand and scale AI offerings and help customers reimagine their businesses through the generative power of AI.”

As PwC announced about the OpenAI deal, the company will be the first-ever reseller of ChatGPT Enterprise — not just the first Big Four company, the first company in any category — and the largest user of the product. Instead of speaking in vague words that sound cool but tell us little about real-world applications, they chose to describe two specific ways they are currently using GenAI. Props to them for this.

(W)e are already developing custom GPTs to help our employees review tax returns, generate proposal responses, software lifecycle assistants, generate dashboards and reports, and more. These practical applications demonstrate how PwC will leverage GenAI solutions to solve complex business problems.

We are actively engaged in GenAI, leading 950 of our top 1,000 U.S. advisory clients, and we discuss the use and implications of AI with many of our audit clients, highlighting the near-universal demand across industries for the transformative power of this technology.

I’m going to drop this link here in case we need it later. For no reason.

Digging around PwC’s website, we find some more tangible examples of how the company is using AI internally to advance its goals.

• IT: productivity increase in software development processes from 20% to 50%. Software development is crucial to our business. Our internal teams develop the applications that make our business run and help customers create software tailored to their individual needs. GenAI has revolutionized the way our development teams work: customized tools help synthesize data, complete and review code, generate documentation, perform rapid and detailed troubleshooting (through root cause analysis), and more.
• Finance: productivity increase from 20% to 40% in accounting and taxes. Data analysis, document summarization and generation, chat questions and answers, and much more are faster – thanks to the combination of GenAI’s specialized tools. For example: One GenAI tool now enables our finance department to create first drafts of new contracts and extract key information from existing ones in seconds.
• Marketing: productivity increase from 20% to 30%. from our specialized GenAI model to help generate marketing content, and from company-wide models to automate workflow documentation, review documents for risk, summarize and analyze documents and audio, and enable access to questions and answers for data analysis. Our people create our marketing – GenAI helps them create it faster, making it more data-driven and personalized.

Company added in today’s announcement:

We have entered the “prove” phase where we are actively demonstrating the capabilities and benefits of GenAI. We have already identified over 3,000 internal use cases for GenAI that are driving end-to-end transformation within our own company and represent limitless potential applications for customers across industries including financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, hospitality and more. We take a holistic approach and leverage our deep industry experience to help our clients transform with AI, connecting sources of value to common AI patterns to drive impact. This approach enables our clients to achieve faster results with greater productivity, consistency and efficiency.

We’d like to know the financial details of this deal, but unfortunately none are provided, so we’ll just have to use our imagination.

PwC is accelerating AI adoption with ChatGPT Enterprise in the US, UK and across clients (PwC)