Michael Kovac/Getty Images
- Ernst & Young has invested $1.4 billion in artificial intelligence.
- The consulting giant announced a new AI platform and its own large language model.
- The company now plans on teaching its 400,000 employees how to use AI in the workplace.
Ernst & Young is betting big on AI.
On Wednesday, the consulting and strategy giant announced it had completed a $1.4 billion investment into AI and that, over the last 18 months, it had developed a series of in-house artificial intelligence tools.
"It's about unlocking new economic value responsibly to realize the vast potential of this technological evolution," Carmine Di Sibio, EY's CEO and global chairman, wrote in a press release.
As part of its investment, the firm developed its own large language model, EY.ai EYQ, which will be used as an in-house chat interface. The model is currently trained on information publicly available on the internet, but the company hopes to train it on internal data, like more than a century's worth of tax figures, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Client data will not be used to train the model, the company added, and any prompts fed to EY.ai EYQ "are not retained or used by the model," an EY spokesperson told Insider.
The firm also announced EY.ai, an AI-powered platform that the company hopes will help clients incorporate artificial intelligence into their workflows.
The platform, available to EY's client base, includes a payroll chatbot that the company says will answer "complex employee payroll questions."
Other features will help clients manage their data; provide predictive analytics; aid with content search and summarization; and will allow clients to see if the numbers in financial documents match the numbers in their audits, according to the press release.
Microsoft provided the consulting firm with early access to OpenAI's GPT-3 and GPT-4 language models, which were used as a foundation for "building and deploying advanced generative AI solutions to enhance EY service offerings," EY said.
The company will train all 400,000 of its employees to use the technology, a spokesperson told Insider. It has begun rolling out AI learning and development services, and, as of last week, more than 5,000 employees have already started the training, the company said.
EY joins other consulting firms spending billions of dollars on AI technology.
In April, fellow Big Four consultancy PwC said it would spend $1 billion over three years to grow its AI offerings. KPMG followed in July, announcing its plans to spend $2 billion on AI and cloud services for the workplace over the next five years. Last December, Deloitte announced a $1.4 billion investment in professional development services, including trainings on how to use AI.
It's not just consulting firms that have taken an interest in the technology: Earlier this month, Walmart announced it's giving corporate employees an AI "assistant" to enhance productivity, and companies like Meta, Netflix, and dating app Hinge are offering six-figure salaries to workers with generative AI skills.