Charles Platiau/Reuters
- KPMG is betting big on AI — another sign the technology's use is spreading fast.
- The Big Four accounting and consultancy will partner with Microsoft with a $2 billion investment.
- They plan to jointly develop generative AI tools for areas like the supply chain and cybersecurity.
KPMG, one of the world's largest accounting and consulting companies, is putting AI to work — and with 265,000 employees in 143 countries and territories, it's one of the biggest signs yet just how fast the technology is spreading.
The company is betting on its clients increasingly looking to AI to help them in areas like managing their supply chains and improving their cybersecurity defenses.
Under a new partnership with Microsoft, KPMG will invest $2 billion over five years into the team effort, Carl Carande, US vice chair and global head of KPMG Advisory, told Insider. Microsoft didn't put a monetary figure on its part of the effort.
Through their tie-up, the companies plan to jointly develop generative AI tools for KPMG's employees and clients, he said. "I think some of the legacy ways of doing business executing services are going to become obsolete," Carande said.
For instance, AI can help companies use information like market trends and sales data to figure out how they should be stocking products so their inventory is meeting demands, Carande said.
"AI can help analyze historical data, identify patterns, and detect correlations that may not be apparent to human analysts," he said.
On the cybersecurity defense front, generative AI can help interpret a range of data to provide quicker information about potential threats and how to respond to them.
"A human with experience, intuition, and insider knowledge is still essential for picking out hard-to-detect anomalies," Carande said. "But generative AI provides a huge head start."
KPMG advises banks and financial institutions, energy companies, local governments around the world, and companies across industries, according to its website.
The company's employees in the US are already using generative AI chat tools, which were developed with OpenAI technology, to perform tasks like drafting content, creating code, and summarizing documents, Carande said.
But its use of AI has not led to its layoffs so far, he said. KPMG had said it planned to let go 5% of its employees in the US, Reuters reported in June, but Carande told Insider that AI "did not play into that at all."
Future considerations for hiring for certain roles in coding, writing, and research may change, he said.
"We're continuing to grow, we're going to have more professionals, but they're going to have a different level of technical acumen leveraging generative AI, ChatGPT and other tools," he said.
"And it's going to put them in a position to actually add more value faster," he added.
A representative for Microsoft declined to comment beyond the companies' statement.