Top 25 firm Crowe
"It is impossible to overstate the transformative power and value AI will bring to businesses and communities," said Mark Baer, Crowe CEO. "Responsibly harnessing the power of AI to accelerate innovation will drive success for our clients. With the largescale expansion of our AI CoE, we are moving even further ahead with an AI infrastructure to drive AI adoption for our clients. We are separating the hype from the real-world impact and enabling the strategic and ethical adoption of AI to drive meaningful business outcomes."
The three teams will work with clients to advise and assist them on AI in a holistic way. The AI Lab explores new technologies and use cases, and develops proofs of concept for clients. The AI Engineering team — staffed with engineers and data scientists — facilitates the development of purpose-built AI solutions and products for clients' specific use cases. And the AI Enablement team focuses on implementation of solutions, change management and education.
For Crowe, the goal is to help clients gain momentum on four key aspects of AI adoption: AI data curation and quality, AI governance, AI transformation, and the development of bespoke AI tools and solutions. The center will also play a major role in advancing the firm's own internal adoption of AI in its business operations and service delivery.
The newly formed teams are a repurposing of several smaller legacy data science and product engineering teams, with the firm increasing their size and shifting their focus to AI-related projects, according to a spokesperson from Crowe in an email.
The expansion effectively doubles the size of the prior collective group. The core AI Center of Excellence has expanded from 41 people to 81, with plans for further growth next year. These are mostly new hires, along with some transfers from other parts of Crowe's technology group, with plans for significant hiring of AI and innovation expertise. The center also encompasses the hundreds of other staff members who have added AI implementations to their regular duties across business units throughout the firm.
The AI Center of Excellence will be multidisciplinary across the firm's portfolio of services and will be led by firm veteran Doug Schrock in the newly created role of Firmwide AI Managing Principal. He has spent his career advising clients on how to set strategy, innovate and implement transformative technologies that redefine the way jobs and business get done.
"AI is the most transformative technology development in our lifetimes, with the mainstream emergence of generative AI being just the start on our path to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)," said Schrock. "Right now, the window is open for organizations to beat their competition by innovative and aggressive adoption of AI to cut costs, increase speed and create disruptive value propositions for their customers. I believe that many organizations watching from the sidelines will find themselves in an unexpected fight for survival."
