EY, PwC, KPMG
Visit freshyourfeel.org for more information.
- The Big Four professional services firms have invested billions in AI tools for their workforces.
- But how are senior staff at the biggest consulting firms using those tools?
- Business Insider asked leaders from EY, PwC, and KPMG how they use AI in their day-to-day work.
AI is rapidly reshaping the consulting industry. From hiring and pricing to the day-to-day work of consultants, the biggest firms are rethinking how they operate — and investing billions in AI tools to do it.
In interviews with Big Four leaders this year, Business Insider has asked how they see that transformation playing out. But we've also been curious about how the people at the top of these multibillion-dollar firms are using AI themselves.
So recently, we've closed every interview with a simple question: How are you using AI in your day-to-day work?
The answers ranged from faster industry insights and automated scheduling to business strategy and even AI-created visuals of dolphins.
Errol Gardner, EYErrol GardnerEY
Errol Gardner is global vice chair of consulting at EY. His job involves traveling the world to meet with EY's teams and support them with client interaction.
The way he most often uses AI is to mine information about clients and organizations that he speaks to and generate "ultra-fast briefings" to prepare for meetings, he told Business Insider.
For example, ahead of a recent meeting with the CEO of a life insurance company in Japan, Gardner said he used AI to research the context of the industry, asking questions like: "How does it play with all the international players? What are the key issues they have market-wise? What are they trying to solve for? What's their strategy saying?"
Three years ago, it would have taken a whole team of people a couple of weeks to gather that information and answer back-and-forth questions to help Gardner prepare. Now with four or five different prompts, you have a brief and "you sound like you know what you're talking about," he said.
"That is probably the most frequent, but also the most valuable use for me because, in terms of that client interaction, it makes a substantive difference to the impact I can have," said Gardner.
Matt Wood, PwCPwC
Matt Wood, PwC's chief technology and innovation officer (CTIO), joined the Big Four firm in 2024 from Amazon Web Services, where he was vice president of AI.
A year ago, Wood said his best use case for AI was as a thought partner, helping with "brainstorming and that creativity of solving a problem in a new way."
While that remains valuable, he said he's now working with several dozen personal agents that can perform tasks on his behalf.
His favorite use case is simulating outcomes, he said. Rather than just brainstorming ideas, Wood uses agents to test different approaches to a problem, asking them to map out how a given strategy might unfold and what the likely results could be.
"That can be as simple as, 'Hey, I'm about to send an email to a group of senior partners. How are they going to react?' Or it can be a more technical specification document," Wood told Business Insider.
"That's an extraordinary net new capability that just has never existed before," he said.
He asks the agents: "What are the different scenarios? What are the things that might cause us to trip over ourselves? What are we not thinking about in enough depth? What do we overanalyze that we didn't need to for next time?"
Sam Gloede, KPMGKPMG
As KPMG's Trusted AI leader, Sam Gloede is leading her firm's efforts to build AI systems that incorporate ethics and trusted frameworks.
Gloede said she focuses on "constantly being a student" of AI and encourages others to do the same. "I want to make sure I can understand this technology deeply so that I know how to control it," she told Business Insider.
"A lot of my everyday activities are now a whole lot better because I've got great tooling to help me," said Gloede, adding that the automation around emails, teams, and meetings is getting better all the time, and helps all the pieces of her day fit together.
Her favorite tool is KPMG's deep research agent, she said. "That helps me really go deep into a topic or a certain market that I'm thinking about. That's really, really helpful."
Gloede said that there are exciting upcoming advances in the firm's agentic AI capabilities that will further integrate it into everyday workflows at KPMG and make it feel more collaborative with users. The tools "will start to learn me and my voice, and that is just going to provide more personalized outcomes," she said.
The goal is to use AI to do more sophisticated work at a greater volume, she said.
Joe Voyles, PwCJoe VoylesPwC
Joe Voyles is an AI and emerging technology partner at PwC. In his day-to-day, Voyles jokingly told Business Insider he's mostly using AI "to fill a personal deficiency," meaning organizing the thoughts and ideas he has on the go.
"I built a second brain," he said. "I forget everything. I used to write stuff down and carry it around in notebooks. So all my notes now are digitized, and then I have my assistant on my desktop," he said.
In his role at PwC, Voyles helps to lead the research, development, and adoption of emerging AI techniques and applications to industry use cases, which means he's seeing a lot of the new ways AI is being applied at the firm, like how partners are starting to work side-by-side with agents.
For example, a non-technical partner recently showed him their coding assistant performing a task. "This was somebody who typically uses Excel files to perform a diligence. They've rethought how they're performing financial diligence work with a coding assistant-first approach that's completely changed their workflow for them."
It's replaced the analog process of keying in numbers within a spreadsheet and making formulas appear and work, he said. It was an "eye-opening moment" that really showed how people will work differently in the future, he added.
Dan Diasio, EYDan DiasioEY
Dan Diasio, EY's global consulting AI leader, told Business Insider that he uses "a whole concert of agents" on a day-to-day basis.
They help him track and monitor a variety of things, he said, but their most significant impact is helping him shape the business strategy, one of the key responsibilities the aforementioned Errol Gardner has given Diasio as AI leader for the firm's consulting division.
"I have a couple of agents that continuously mine news that is happening or other points of view or new research, and then I ask them to pressure test the document and find any holes in the strategy or any new opportunities that I need to start to think about and explore," said Diasio.
He gets them to look at things like which technologies the team should invest in, which new businesses the firm can move into, and anything to indicate where the business can move next, he said.
Diasio reviews the agents' responses with his team each week, he said, but emphasized that it's a continuous process. "I don't assume that strategy is now finished at any point in time," he added.
Rob Fisher, KPMGKPMG
Rob Fisher, global head of advisory and vice chair of KPMG US, had one of the more unique responses to how he uses AI.
Fisher's background is in banking, but he now oversees tens of thousands of employees across different industries and works with clients in 11 sectors. He said that AI has been "incredible as a turbocharger" for helping him quickly get up to speed in sectors he's less familiar with, and cutting through jargon and acronyms in documents.
"I feel like I can be a better leader to people who are in parts of our business further away from where I grew up," he said.
Before a meeting, Fisher said he often pulls together sources in a Notebook LLM and asks it questions about the topic. "I'm not an expert, but I'm also not going to be a complete dummy when I show up for that meeting," he said.
The head of advisory also said he's been collaborating with KPMG's tax business recently, and has used AI to create visuals to better illustrate how the two divisions could work together.
"The fun you can have with creating silly visuals of tax and advisory playing together. We were doing an ocean thing, and we were two dolphins swimming in the sea together, because dolphins have a way of communicating with each other," he told Business Insider.
"It's just fun to visualize creatively," he said. "You can create your own fun stuff right there on the fly, limited only by your imagination."
Have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at [email protected] or Signal at Polly_Thompson.89. Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.
Read the original article on Business Insider