KPMG AI | Workforce: Unlocking tech value through people

As AI technology becomes increasingly prevalent, organisations are seeking ways to turn opportunities and use cases into tangible business value. Leveraging years of industry expertise and strong global alliances with technology partners like Microsoft, Google, and ServiceNow, KPMG is helping clients accelerate AI adoption to drive true return on investment. 

KPMG views AI transformation as both a people and a technological challenge. Both aspects need to work in harmony to unlock the potential of the transformation.

“AI is the fastest adopted business technology that we've seen in history,” says Lucy Pringle, who leads Employee Experience for KPMG in the UK. “You can only really get the best value out of investment in technology, and specifically in generative AI technology, when you transform the people components of your organisation,” adds Lucy. “This is about breaking down years, or decades, of engrained working habits and reforming new, augmented ways of working”  

KPMG's human-centred approach, known as ‘AI | Workforce”, aims to scope and drive AI-led transformation aligned to the greatest areas for opportunity to augment the workforce of each client. Their three-phased approach helps organisations move from answering the questions of “where should I start?” and “how quickly can I move?”, through to “how can I realise value most effectively?”. By deconstructing an organisation’s jobs, identifying their inherent tasks, and predicting genAI augmentation opportunities, KPMG can help clients to design and activate refreshed, genAI enabled jobs for the future.

The first phase is about identifying opportunities, where KPMG draws on a proprietary assessment tool to pinpoint high-value areas for AI to enhance efficiency, effectiveness, quality, compliance and employee experience. They are also supporting clients to build proof of concept tools to experiment with use cases and see what works in reality. The second phase is about supporting organisations to augment their workforce by providing the right tools and designing experiences that unlock the identified value, emphasising the importance of proper support for adoption and capability build. Finally, the third phase of work looks at helping organisations to reshape their workforces by deconstructing and reconstructing roles to optimise on areas of proven augmentation, and to best utilise their people’s skills and time where the human touch adds most value. 

“The fundamental issues that AI helps clients to solve are around profitability, cost, productivity, customer experience, people experience…” explains Mark Williamson, who leads KPMG’s People Consulting business. “Enabling clients to grow is key, and how AI can enable that is fundamentally what this journey is about.”

With years of experience, KPMG has gathered key insights into how organisations should embark on their AI transformation journeys. 

“An AI roadmap should be built on a principle around experimentation and willingness to pivot as you take learnings from what you do,” explains Lucy. 

Other key learnings include recognising that AI transformation is as much about cultural change as technology, requiring significant investment in time and resources. Lucy also says organisations must build foundational AI literacy, focus on tailored adoption strategies linked to different roles in the organisation, and understand that not all investment decisions will be ‘right first time’ and organisations require a test-and-learn mindset.

Mark, meanwhile, highlights KPMG’s pragmatic approach to AI implementation: “What KPMG brings is a really pragmatic approach. It goes beyond the hype and explores the opportunities you have from an AI perspective. How do you prove the value that you're going to get from that? How do you scale the solution?”

Read the full report HERE.

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