Prioritising Sustainability in AI: KPMG's AI 'Genie'
AI is increasingly becoming a part of business. Companies are learning how best to use the tool, where it fits into their operations and how it can be used to boost efficiency, reduce costs and limit errors in processes.
KPMG, one of the leading global consultancies, is supporting many companies in these endeavours.
“It is a double-edged sword that will cut both ways – employing AI for good and using AI to mitigate the impact of developing it,” highlights David Rowlands, Global Head of AI at KPMG.
“The AI genie is out of the bottle – it's now up to humans to grab hold of it and use it for good and to manage the bad.”
The powerful capabilities of AI
AI and sustainability have both encountered significant progress in boardrooms around the world in recent years, prompting conversations about the future of business development. The two now sit alongside finance, regulation and others as key considerations in every conversation.
“The first thing that KPMG did was make sure that our people had the AI technology in their hands,” David says. “We knew that people would be innovative in the field and do great things with their clients on a day-to-day basis that could be enhanced by the general capabilities of AI.
“It is exciting to think about how the capabilities of 270,000 talented, diverse people multiplied by AI is going to go out in the interest of our clients.”
KPMG has been organising people, processes and technologies into operating models to boost efficiencies and production for years – the same is now true of AI.
The organisation is harnessing the technology in several ways across its business to enhance its services and capabilities. Namely through KPMG Ignite, the company's portfolio of AI tools designed to enhance business decisions and processes.
“We want to get AI woven into the operating models, value chains, strategies and senses of purpose of organisations. When you do that, the business and value case of AI becomes exponentially much more powerful.”
AI can also be used to increase the power of compute of sector specific cognitive engines.
“This is where winners and losers are going to be created in each of their sectors,” David adds.
This function essentially boosts efficiency and accuracy – two essentials for healthcare.
“In healthcare, AI is being used to analyse scans and is finding 14% more cancers than the human eye,” David explains. “In hospitals, we are using models to optimise resource allocation so that when a patient comes in, there's always a doctor, a nurse, a bed, the operating theatre – we’ve never had the compute power and the AI capability to be able to solve these things before.”
Looking more specifically at sustainability, AI can be used to boost efficiencies in areas such as land use optimisation and decarbonisation.
- Climate IQ helps KPMG clients in understanding risk and sustainability environments to support strategy development
- ESG IQ helps KPMG clients to use signals to be able to understand the ESG environment in which they're working and respond to those in a proactive capability
“The journey between the two tools is technology, not least of which is AI, which multiplies ideas to get outcomes,” David explains.
“Our passion for ESG now is getting powered up by AI in order to get through to some of these outcomes. We’re using it as a bridge between theory and reality, between ideas and outcomes.The technology is better than ever and easier to put in than it ever was before, so you can create technology in a much more atomised way.”
Introducing David Rowlands
David Rowlands is KPMG’s Global Head of AI, before which he was KPMG UK’s Chief Transformation Officer and spent nearly seven years as Head of Consulting for KPMG UK.
In his current role, David is responsible for the development and implementation of KPMG’s AI strategy across the globe, including embedding AI into KPMG, supporting client uptake, installing the KPMG Trusted AI framework into operations and maximising the opportunities presented by AI technologies.
“When AI came along, we recognised its transformational nature straight away,” he says.
“It is a perfect fit for me because I'm all about transforming our clients and as well as my passion about KPMG.
“We knew that AI was going to be transformational for us – it has shone a light on all the things that we want to do as a practice as KPMG.”
David’s role is multidisciplinary across the audit, tax and advisory sides of the business around the globe.
“We're trying to look at everything that we need to be and everything that our clients need to be at the same time,” he says. “This is the topic that our clients have been most interested in on our own journey that I've experienced.”
KPMG describes itself as client zero – it is its own first client, which has the advantage of allowing a really granular development, at speed.
“We're creating a team of people who are driving forward AI around the world.”
Trusting the process: AI as a business gamechanger
KPMG surveyed 1800 organisations at the board level in collaboration with the University of Queensland in a world-first deep dive into trust and global attitudes towards AI across 17 countries.
The report, titled ‘Trust in Artificial Intelligence: A Global Study 2023’, found that 98% of organisations will do something transformational with AI in the next 12 months, 67% of which will be investing more than US$100m.
All 1,800 – 100% of those surveyed – have a programme to review AI in their organisations.
“For KPMG that's important because 64% of them are expecting their auditors or organisations like KPMG, the big four, to play a massively important role in assurance and review of AI solutions in their environments,” David explains. “In every single conversation with all executives and right across organisations, AI is the topic everyone wants to talk about.
“Despite AI existing for a long time, it's this new generative AI capability that's captured the imagination. It's being very resonant with people – the technology is predictive, probabilistic and therefore by its nature, it's resonant. The next thing that you hear it say is what you were expecting it to say.
“It has encapsulated everyone's minds – from those who have worked in technology for a long time, to those outside of the space who are enabled to understand the power of technology in their environments and to start thinking about the transformation that it can give them.”
Regulating AI to support clients
As the technology emerges, so follows the regulation – slowly, in comparison to AI’s swift emergence.
“The pace of change is ahead of regulation,” David says. “Organisations are having to fill that gap with good corporate governance themselves, but investors are challenging that which is one of the reasons why boards are interested in how they're going to oversee AI in their organisations, as found in the report.”
Finding a lack of official regulation on AI, many companies are turning to KPMG’s Trusted AI Framework to build capabilities.
“I think there's something very positive about the way the EU has described the AI act as a framework because that is probably going to be the construct of regulation that is echoed around the world, which is contextual risk-based with escalating amounts of transparency and reporting that will be required throughout that,” David continues.
“So that combination seems to be a good framework on this that organisations can then get ahead of in their corporate governance.
“In my view there is broad base support for greater regulation across AI and the internet to help organisations adopt more technology to move with greater confidence.”
Building corporate governance, based on the Trusted AI Framework, is a large part of how KPMG is supporting its clients.
“AI is something you need to govern, but it's also a tool that you can use to govern better and analyse the problem better. We're bringing AI into our ESG practice to help them implement that good corporate governance.”
KPMG’s Trusted AI Framework
As AI uptake grows, questions arise about how to manage it ethically. KPMG’s Trusted AI Framework has 10 values split between three foundational principles – values-driven, human-centric and trustworthy.
“I think every individual and organisation are sort of split right down the middle between huge excitement about what this will do and then huge trepidation about what it might do,” David says.
Thankfully, this is not a new issue – existing ethical frameworks, technology risk frameworks and ISO standards have all supported the development of KPMG’s Trusted AI Framework, the first of its kind to come to market.
The 10 capabilities are things that organisations need to master if they are going to be trusted in their use of AI.
“When we invented the wheel it was generally a good technology, but it also ran over people's toes,” David says. “Similarly when the internet was developed it brought up many moral and ethical dilemmas.”
There are many risk management techniques in place to avoid toes being run over, just as there are many frameworks, regulations and mitigation strategies around the internet. KPMG has been a front-runner in supporting its clients to mitigate and manage risks in ethical AI use.
“At KPMG, we know that to be trusted, you need to do more than just do no bad,” David continues. “You have to step forward on trust, you have to define trust. And so when we were working on our trusted AI framework, we added two important topics – fairness and sustainability.”
David is an advocate for equal access to AI, to avoid the further development of the digital skills gap.
“When something like AI comes along, you want to make sure that there are no winners and losers, that everyone has access to AI,” he says. “At a global, country, corporation and individual level, are we giving people access to devices, the internet energy to be able to use it and the training that they need?
“AI can be a way of reconnecting back with the workforce and becoming more effective, more powerful.”
AI is already reinventing processes, embedding into global workforces and transforming workplaces – the fairness pillar centres around ensuring that companies use AI to bring people into the workforce and bridge the digital divide rather than further polarising.
“As we throw everything up in the air with AI, we need to ensure that what lands is a future that is a fairer, more equal and more equitable end output than the one we started with.”
Humans at the heart of AI
KPMG’s AI development starts internally – as its own client zero. From there, clients benefit from tried and tested technology that comes to them at speed.
“We believe in a human-centric implementation of AI into KPMG,” David says, “So we advise that for our clients.”
By internally examining AI – how it can upgrade KPMG’s services, which new services are required because of AI, delivery model, potential futures, upskilling the workforce, regulation, ethics and much more – KPMG is in the best position to support its clients, as proven by its first-to-market Ethical AI Framework.
“We're having these incredible conversations about AI’s impact in KPMG, but we're also encouraging our clients to get it out of the experimentation phase and into a broad enterprise wide transformation so that they can maximise the good and minimise the bad,” David says.
“Our priority at KPMG is to be trusted and our Trusted AI Framework rolling out globally supports that vision for our clients.”
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