Big Four firm PwC is highly confident that generative AI will become an even more important part of the business world over the next year, and advised accountants to become more familiar with the technology in turn. In its seventh annual set of predictions for AI, PwC was blunt in what it felt would be the profound impact generative AI would have on businesses and the accountants who work with them.
"Artificial intelligence (AI) will start to fundamentally change how business gets done. It will impact how companies grow revenue, conduct everyday operations, engage customers and employees, build new business models, and more," said PwC.
PwC predicted, first, that many organizations will see return on investment for generative AI next year, but the most successful ones will be those who take advantage of generative AI's capacity to be customized to their specific needs and its scalability — while also paying close attention to its potential risks. This means, rather than thinking in terms of specific use cases, people should prioritize "patterns" that can scale, such as using its ability to draw insights from unstructured data, such as text, in order to make better decisions.
It also predicted that AI proficiency will be a major competitive factor, and said that while AI itself won't replace people, those who use AI will replace those who do not. This is especially trenchant for managers, who it said will need skills to oversee and assess teams in which AI agents do much of the work. Functional leads will have to understand how AI cannot just augment processes but replace them. The C-suite will have to take the lead on AI-native operations and business models.
In order to realize these gains, though, PwC also predicted that digital trust will be a deciding factor in the success of generative AI. In what it says will be a moment of truth for AI trust, the PwC report said trust means more than just compliant, secure systems. It means deploying the right solutions for the right situation with the right data, policies and oversight to achieve relevant, reliable results. That requires responsible AI, an enterprise-wide approach and set of practices.
Those who leverage generative AI effectively, said PwC, will see great gains especially in the ability to turn data into value, giving initiatives an attractive cost/benefit ratio that they may have lacked before. At the same time, this will require that people digitize data, move it to the cloud, enable generative AI to access it, assure reliability and compliance, and manage risks. While this may be a lot of work for some, PwC said it will yield fruit in the form of generative AI being able to handle complex tasks and processes that were previously out of reach in finance, tax, legal, IT, compliance and other departments.
And this is just the beginning. Over time, the PwC report said, generative AI will allow for the creation of entirely new classes of products and services. It predicted that, soon, enterprise applications will have generative AI not as an add-on but as the core. It said we'll also see products and services that result from generative AI's convergence with other technologies, including machine learning, such as augmented reality, Internet of Things networks, machine learning processes and more.
All this in mind, PwC said that organizations should:
- Be ambitious in their generative AI goals;
- Provide incentives for innovation;
- Remember that the goal is to increase the capacity of human workers versus replacing them;
- Make use of AI natives in their own organizations;
- Embrace responsible AI from the start;
- Avoid reinventing the wheel;
- Ensure the C-suite is involved in responsible AI use;
- Accelerate data migration to the cloud;
- Consider appointing a "data steward" who constantly considers its quality and its usefulness to others in your organization;
- Outsource and offshore less;
- Create new workflows and technology tools that use generative AI versus adapting the technology to current ones; and,
- Ensure the organization's tech stack is up to date.
