KPMG’s AI chief explains how to make AI work for your business

KPMG has invested heavily and partnered with Microsoft as it implements its AI strategy.

KPMG, one of the Big Four consultancies, has weaved AI into all its operations and is advising global businesses about how to do the same.

All employees across the firm’s three divisions — accounting, tax, and advisory — have the ability to use AI. Everyone has access to a form of GPT and roughly a fifth of the global workforce have Copilot licenses, David Rowlands, KPMG’s global head of AI, told B-17.

“Whatever they were doing already, they can now do quicker,” he said in an interview.

But the vast majority of companies are still on the adoption path, and clients who come to KPMG are still thinking about how to get it going and how to get the data, Rowlands said.

Clients’ concerns about AI have shifted over time: First, it was ethics, hallucinations, and trust; the past four or five months, it’s been about realizing the business case and enabling the workforce to adopt it; and next, it’s the question of data and how organizations differentiate through their data and protect it.

B-17 spoke with Rowlands about KPMG’s own adoption journey and how the firm advises businesses as they deepen their use of AI.

David Rowlands was appointed as KPMG’s head of AI in December 2023. 

One of the biggest barriers for companies to overcome is the focus on single-use cases for AI systems.

Many businesses are deploying an AI agent to sit over a curated database and pick out data to make rapid recommendations to a human operator, he explained. But systems must have reusability.

“What you have to think about is having AI embedded in your operating model,” he said. “At KPMG, we’re keen to get people beyond use cases because a point piece of technology, a point use case, hasn’t been a particularly effective business case.”

Clarity on the business case is also the best way to see a return on investment, he added.

The question of returns has been a hot topic among CEOs as billions of dollars continue to pour into AI infrastructure. Some economists and analysts have warned that money is being wasted on hype, while others have said the rate of improvement is slowing and AI is hitting a wall.

KPMG is buying into the hype. In 2023, the firm said it would invest $2 billion in artificial intelligence and cloud services in partnership with Microsoft over the next five years and expected the strategy to generate more than $12 billion in revenue over that period.

In November, it announced a $100 million investment in Google Cloud, which it said could drive $1 billion in growth.

Rowlands said it’s hard to get clients to see the wider impact when they can’t see an immediate ROI. But he said the benefits would come through improvements in growth, quality, and agility: “We already see that a copilot system saves about 40 minutes a week.”

In mid-2024, some of KPMG’s surveys on returns were “ambivalent,” but they’re now “getting some anecdotal evidence of ROI,” Rowlands said. This time next year, he added, COOs and CFOs are going to be positive about the returns they’re getting.

Data will differentiate your business

How to approach data is another barrier for clients in their AI journey, Rowlands said.

“Organizations will be increasingly differentiated by the data that they own,” he said. That requires becoming more mindful about where your data sits, who owns it, where it’s generated, and how you keep it up to date.

Data will only be more integral as we enter the next stage of AI’s evolution, Rowlands added. He expects that within the next 12 months, multi-agent models — a group of specialized AI agents that coordinate to solve a collective goal —will rapidly become a reality.

“That is where AI is going to start to have a big impact on solving some of the biggest problems, such as decarbonization,” he said.

Preparing the workforce for these changes is part of implementing AI responsibly, Rowlands said.

KPMG ran a “24 hours of AI” training session in January this year. The key message was that everyone should know how to use AI against their problems and be trusted and innovative with their use of it in front of clients. The firm is continuing to train its workforce in data curation, looking after data, and prompt craft.

Rowlands doesn’t deny that AI will have a “deep transformational impact” on the professional-services industry. He said there would be a rotation of jobs, as happened with the internet, but it wouldn’t diminish consultants’ purpose.

“We don’t really think about replacing jobs. It’s more about enhancing individuals and roles. And those who are using AI well are being more successful than those who aren’t.

“Our consultants will, as they’ve always done, strive increasingly to make sure that our clients are getting valuable outcomes out of our work.”