How EY is moving from AI experiments to mainstream integration for enterprises

EY, one among the big four global professional services firms, looks to deliver measurable outcomes with the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) platforms for its customers’ businesses.

EY’s Global Delivery Services (GDS), the firm's global capability centre (GCC), is playing a key role in driving the AI agenda.

In an interaction with Enterprise Story, Raj Sharma, Managing Partner, EY said, “Our teams have built a lot of enabling technologies where rather than selling AI, we are selling outcomes.”

As an example from the financial services industry, Sharma said earlier engagements with customers were just focused on tax and audit functions, but now, they provide an AI service that can spot money laundering or fraud. “We tell them (customers) to pay us only when you get the alert,” he remarked.

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Today, AI platforms and solutions have moved on from experimentation to mainstream integration, especially with the influx of agentic AI. Enterprises are keen to implement AI, even though there are certain question marks on its tangible outcomes.

According to Sharma, enterprises are deploying AI in the core operations now, after implementing in functions such as HR, sales or supply chain.

Towards this end, EY has undertaken deep integration of AI within its functions so that its employees, when they are engaged with businesses, are better equipped to guide how this technology can be integrated. There are a lot of discussions in EY about where AI should be deployed first and how one benefit the maximum from it.

Ajay Anand, Global Vice Chair, EY GDS, was emphatic about the scale of AI, which he says will be bigger and is going to be transformational.

Here, EY GDS is playing a key role in delivering the majority of AI solutions. It has over 80,000 employees located in the Philippines, Argentina, Mexico, Poland, and India. The India centre is the largest operation.

Sharma said, “GDS is no longer the back office but is now the core delivery model.”

For EY, there is no fixation on a particular AI platform or large language models, as it believes in providing the outcomes for enterprises where it can become their growth engine.

However, there are certain things to keep in mind when enterprises. Firstly, there is change management, where one can face resistance when any new technology is being introduced, and this calls for a well-thought-out upskilling plan. Secondly, the success of any AI model largely depends on how clean the data is, and lastly, one needs to look at the commercial costs of AI.

EY has its presence in four areas: audit, tax, strategy, and consulting. In each of these segments, there are varying levels of AI readiness by the firm. However, the firm’s executives emphasised one point that AI will not replace human workers as it is only going to augment their capabilities.