So talk to us this this commitment to
bring more in. I'm assuming this is all a productivity
boost. Well, you know, you think about the
velocity of change right now, Caroline, and the speed of innovation and
generative AI. Many of us weren't even talking about it
nine months ago. And now it's all anybody wants to talk
about. It's amazing that velocity of change and
speed of innovation. So to Co-develop Solutions with
Microsoft for all of our businesses, all to tax and advisory that we can bring to
market some of those solutions already under development and some are in
nascent stages but really excited about the power of that partnership and we can
bring to market in the future working together with Microsoft.
So we will spend 2 billion or invest 2 billion over the next five years on AI
and cloud and we expect to generate about $12 billion of additional revenue
over the next several years through cybersecurity solutions, through cloud
migration, and also through new innovative applications that use to
innovate AI. So with your own workforce, having the
early access to Microsoft three, six, five copilot, the Azure Open Air
Service, ultimately will you have a competitive edge?
Will others follow your lead? Will they also do deals in Microsoft?
So there's no doubt they will. This is not an exclusive arrangement and
we are going to be investing in general of AI across the board.
So we're looking for additional opportunities.
But we think our long standing relationship with Microsoft, which dates
back to 2000 in our history of working with them as a partner, even going to
market with them with 2500 clients, with as joint clients, that we have an edge
in the sense that we have that long, strong history of development and we're
going to ideate with them the power of their technology, with the power of our
knowledge, experience and advisory tax. Auditing is a really great combination
for ensuring that we can solve our client's most complex problems and
actually also help our communities and society be better.
How are you selling this to your workforce?
Because a lot of anxiety is out there that, Well, I was going to take our
jobs, right? Well, if I look at the 40 years I've
been at KPMG and I think about the history of of technology, I haven't seen
a technology disruption. I think this is the greatest technology
disruption in many decades. I haven't seen one yet that's caused a
loss of workforce on a gross basis, on a net basis.
So I actually believe that workforces over time will grow with general AI.
We're going to need more people to interpret results, to co-develop
solutions, to develop solutions. They're going to need more data.
Scientists will need a lot of quality and cyber assessments of the information
that the generative AI applications produce.
So as I think about that history of technology disruption and what it's done
to the workforce, it's actually generated economic activity that should
allow for us to grow our workforces in the future and actually also put some of
those mundane routine tasks that people don't enjoy doing and upskill people to
do more interesting creative things. And you've been out to the executives
that you work for the clients, and they seem to agree.
They're also saying, look, this is actually going to add to employees.
This is going to add to our productivity.
That's right. So, you know, we just completed a survey
recently where 80% of executives said that this would be a major disruption,
75% said to be their top emerging technology for the next 18 months.
And there's general agreement to that. It was going to add headcount over time.
So we feel pretty confident that it will also reduce stress because some of these
mundane tasks, again, will no longer have to be done by people and they can
then provide more value added advice, do more creative things in the in the work
environment. Here's to having more exciting work.
I'm excited. I'm interested that you've referenced
cyber and the way in which you're going to be using generative AI that a lot of
the worries and there's been this quick adoption by companies to use Openai AI
team with Microsoft, but they don't want their own workforce using it because
they're worried about their own data and it somehow
ending up in the data troves that are going to be in my own chat Chip.
How have you dealt with that? The privacy angle.
So when we use a chat CBT version, we use it in our own secure environment and
not the open source application that's out there, which provides a lot of
protection. And we also really value the enterprise
protection and security that Microsoft brings to us.
So we want to use AI responsibly, ethically and in a very secure
environment. As we develop these solutions, we're
going to ensure that companies have that same kind of security, governance and
architecture built around their solutions.
That's going to be very important for the future because there are those
concerns, along with concerns around data accuracy to.
