KPMG International has introduced two new cognitive solutions under its partnership with IBM. The solutions integrate IBM Watson artificial intelligence technology with the Big Four firm’s advisory and tax services.
The KPMG Contract Abstraction Tool addresses lease accounting, automating the extraction of lease contract data. The solution, which applies IBM Watson Explorer, a cognitive exploration and content analysis platform, identifies trends, patterns, anomalies and relationships within the data.
The tool, designed for International Financial Reporting Standards 16, was developed by the KPMG Lighthouse Center of Excellence for Data & Analytics and Intelligent Automation team in Germany, and IBM Germany.
The second offering is KPMG Research Tax Credit Services with Watson, designed to help companies examine relevant documents to obtain evidence identifying research projects eligible for credit subsidies and provide higher-quality documentation to help retain the credit subsidy in case of an Internal Revenue Audit audit.
According to the firm, companies that are eligible to claim the research tax credit may be able to see benefits like reduced income taxes, enhanced cash flow, increased financial statement earnings and earnings per share with the tool.
“IBM is making AI more accessible for organizations, embedding this technology in workflows and helping businesses gain insights from data to make better informed decisions,” said Beth Smith, general manager of Watson data and AI, in a statement. “The introduction of these Watson-enabled solutions with KPMG is key to bringing the benefits of AI to professionals across the business. With the help of Watson, these KPMG solutions are able to scale the expertise of the organization.”
“Through our alliance with IBM, we’re developing cognitive solutions with Watson that allow greater collaboration between humans and systems,” added Steve Rainey, chief innovation officer and national leader of data and analytics, tax, and a partner with KPMG in the U.S. “Ensuring the ‘human in the loop’ means that our professionals’ skills and experience will be augmented by systems to help deliver richer insights for our clients.”
