“AI provides much more than efficiency gains. AI offers fundamentally new ways of creating value.”
Scott Likens,
Global AI and Innovation Technology Leader, PwC US
We are at the forefront of realising AI’s potential
At PwC, we believe so strongly in AI’s ability to transform what people and companies can do that we are investing nearly US$2 billion to expand and scale our AI capabilities across our network including a US$1 billion+ investment by PwC US, US$418 million by PwC China, US$200 million by PwC Canada, €150 million by PwC Germany, and over US$100 million invested by PwC UK in AI and advanced tech. In addition, we are building strategic partnerships with Microsoft, Google, Amazon Web Services and other innovative tech leaders to help realise AI’s potential, while PwC Central and Eastern Europe is helping countries like Hungary create their national AI strategy and AI Innovation Hub.
“The importance of AI is not exaggerated. It will fundamentally change how we work and how we live. The impact will be enormous, and there is no turning back.”
Mohamed Kande,
Global Advisory Leader, PwC US
We offer clients clear steps to turn the promise of this technology into real-world value. Our AI specialists are developing hundreds of AI use cases, enabled by our deep industry expertise and our broad skills in areas from business process design to supply chain optimisation.
“AI is the Industrial Revolution of knowledge work. Companies can make every employee as smart as their best employee.”
Matt Labovich,
AI and Data Analytics Leader, PwC US
We are helping clients transform whole value chains with AI. For example, we are helping firms deploy AI at every stage from pinpointing market trends to developing products to managing supply chains to handling customer queries to auto-optimising KPIs — and more.
Simply put, if it involves information, AI has the potential to transform it for the better.
We are using AI across our global network
This year, we deployed AI across many of our key lines of business from law to tax to consulting. In addition, we are in the process of launching a proprietary tool called ChatPwC (in partnership with AI leaders OpenAI and Microsoft) to parts of our business to help our people deftly command our own data in powerful new ways. We’re already starting to see productivity surge in some areas by as much as 40%.
We’re proud to be awarded '2023 Digital Innovation of the Year' for progress in the use of emerging AI tools across our network, in particular our global suite of AI services in audit.
“AI is creating mind-blowing shifts in what teams are able to deliver. We are able to solve problems that were beyond anyone’s grasp until now.”
Bivek Sharma,
Chief Technology Officer for Tax, Legal and People, PwC UK
We are helping AI do good for society
AI has tremendous potential to benefit society, fuelling faster progress on issues from crime detection to cancer treatment.
This year, we are proud to continue our work supporting AI-driven progress on critical challenges like sustainability. We work with leading not-for-profit organisations and collaborate with major companies to research how AI can be used to benefit society and create applications that make a lasting impact.
For example, we’ve helped simulate the economic benefits of including women in the workforce in emerging nations, and we’ve modelled the carbon footprint impact of planting trees. See below for case studies that show how we are deploying AI to help our clients develop clean energy, improve heart attack detection, and more.
Managing AI’s impacts
Like many powerful technologies, AI must be responsibly managed to ensure that it has positive impacts on society. PwC US helped to pioneer the concept of responsible AI, developing a framework for AI’s ethical use. We published our views on how business leaders can safely manage the risks of generative AI. We continue to develop innovative tools to help clients manage AI’s risks, such as PwC US’s proprietary Bias Analyzer that helps prevent, identify, and fix biases in AI models. In addition, we are supporting the transition to renewable energy to help meet AI’s energy needs in an environmentally responsible way.
We believe AI’s overall impact on jobs will be to open up tremendous possibilities for people to create value in new ways. That’s why, this year, our Global Chair Bob Moritz spoke at worldwide forums like VivaTech about the ways that AI complements workers and strengthens the need for human skills.
The results of our 2023 Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey show that workers are optimistic about AI’s effect on jobs. Only 13% of employees think AI will replace their role. In fact, 52% of workers expect AI to have at least one positive impact on their jobs from helping them increase their productivity to helping them build new skills.
“With every technological revolution, productivity expectations go up. AI opens up the ability to do jobs that weren’t possible before. I would be surprised if our people aren’t even more in demand.”
Bivek Sharma,
Chief Technology Officer for Tax, Legal and People, PwC UK
Case Studies
Human-led, tech-powered
Our work on AI underscores PwC’s approach to driving human-led, tech-powered solutions that deliver positive, sustained outcomes. Here are five case studies that illustrate just a few of the ways that we are helping to deploy AI to benefit business and society.
Case Study
AI is the key driver in fairer and faster car insurance claims
Most people carry a smartphone, so most people involved in a car accident can readily share photos of the damage with their insurers.
That is a great help to the car insurance industry, but also a logistical challenge. Processing and assessing a flood of digital images can take a huge amount of time, resources and expertise.
That’s where our client, an insurtech company, was quick to see both a solution and an exciting commercial opportunity. Why not deploy AI to assess the damage shown in each image and come up with a reliable estimate for the repair work and/or replacement parts? If AI were harnessed correctly, it would not only speed up the claims and save money, but also make the process fairer to both the insurers and insured.
When these innovators turned to PwC US to advise, our AI and Analytics team got to work with their science team and damage assessors to create an AI solution that would sometimes pick up details that the hard-pressed assessors, going through the images manually, had overlooked.
To succeed, however, the AI technology had to be trusted by the insurer, their clients and, in particular, their assessors. The way to achieve this was through transparency — showing all stakeholders how the AI technology had arrived at its decisions by making clear the analytical determinations and rationale at every stage of the process.
Francois Ramette,
Insurance Consulting, Principal, Strategy&, PwC US
“Through this unique approach to explainable AI, our client has offered a powerful example to the industry of the potential power of AI-assisted processes. They had concrete validation that an AI-assisted approach works and has the potential to improve other aspects of their overall process.”
Case Study
Using AI to cut through a thicket of information
Government agencies often hold vast stores of valuable information. However, this information isn’t always easy to access and analyse.
One major government agency in the Middle East has more than 1,500 government services available on its online directory, each one accumulating daily its own useful stores of data. Inevitably, the old methods of accessing this information could be slow and labour intensive.
PwC Middle East was called in to find a way to cut through this vast thicket of information. Our team chose to leverage cutting edge generative AI. Deployed with precision, the generative AI algorithms were able to process the data almost instantly, providing comprehensive and relevant information to users that would in the past have taken significant amounts of time and labour to locate. The solution delighted the client, its employees — and, most of all, researchers.
Moussa Beidas, Partner, PwC Middle East
“PwC Middle East helped find a way to leverage leading edge generative AI to more easily access and gain insights from data. This approach saves vast amounts of manpower and time, and, better still, gives legitimate data users the swift and easy data access they crave.”
Case Study
AI helps in the quest for cheaper hydrogen
Hydrogen is regarded as one of the solutions to the climate challenges facing the world, but it is expensive and difficult to produce. Hystar is a business that is making great strides forward in addressing this challenge, establishing a reputation as a manufacturer of efficient Polymer Electrolyte Membrane (PEM) electrolysers.
PEM electrolysers are fundamental to hydrogen production. Equipped with an array of sensors, Hystar’s electrolysers monitor parameters, including pressure and temperature. Proper use and interpretation of this data is crucial to making the most of the electrolysers' performance, thereby enhancing cost-effectiveness and operational efficiency.
Hystar turned to PwC Norway to help them unlock the value of their data. Our multidisciplinary team built data pipelines and analytic tools on cloud infrastructure to simplify Hystar R&D’s collection and analysis of data from the hydrogen sensors. PwC also facilitated a Design Thinking workshop with key hydrogen stakeholders from around the world to explore how to prepare products for gigawatt scale.
The outcome — achieved by working with the client in their office — was especially satisfying for all concerned since the result was cheaper hydrogen which is in the interests not just of the business, but the planet.
Lars Erlend Leganger,
Risk Services, Director, PwC Norway
“Finding a cost effective way to produce hydrogen — and at scale — is a strategically important battle in the bigger war against climate change. Hystar is in the frontline and PwC Norway has been proud to be fighting alongside them, deploying AI to make their electrolysers still more efficient.”
Case Study
Detecting heart attacks in women with the help of AI
One third of all deaths in Germany are caused by heart disease, making it a sadly all too common cause of death. One cause of this high death rate is misdiagnosis of heart attacks in women. Research by the British Heart Foundation has shown that women are more than 50% more likely than men to be misdiagnosed after having a heart attack because women are more likely to suffer from subtle, atypical symptoms which are not easily recognised by doctors.
Part of the problem is that much less is known about heart disease symptoms experienced by women because women have often been underrepresented in medical studies. Women accounted for only a quarter of participants in 31 major heart failure studies conducted in Germany between 1987 and 2012.
In an effort to redress this imbalance, a team at PwC Germany is cooperating with Strategy&, the Peter Osypka Heart Center Munich and the Technical University of Munich to develop an AI-powered model that can identify gender-specific risk factors and therefore enable doctors to more quickly and accurately diagnose heart attacks in women. The goal of this technology is to help doctors provide better screening and diagnoses and ultimately reduce deaths from heart disease, especially in women.
An added benefit is that this AI-driven application may be able to help prevent the over-usage of cardiac CT scans. From 2024, cardiac CT scans will be included in the range of services provided by public health insurance to everyone in Germany, prompting concerns that scarce CT devices will be over-used. A model that can identify those who are most at risk of a heart attack — and who should therefore be prioritised for a scan — will be important in helping people get the care they need.
Petra Justenhoven, Senior Partner and Chair, PwC Europe
“This is a good example that many of the challenges ahead are best met when different disciplines work together and human know-how is combined with pioneering technologies. AI can help to collect, evaluate, objectify and specify health information more easily — especially with regard to gender-specific differences, which are very large in the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of cardiovascular diseases.”
Case Study
Using AI to conduct cataract screening
Cataracts are the world’s leading cause of treatable blindness and severe visual impairment, and especially affect people aged 50 or over. They are a particular problem in India where a number of studies — including from The British Journal of Ophthalmology — state about 4.8 million people become blind from cataracts each year. Unfortunately, India has an insufficient number of cataract screening centres, and many elderly people in India find it difficult to travel to be tested, so many cataract cases are not detected in time.
To address this problem, a team in PwC India has helped a client to develop an AI-powered solution, deployable on mobile applications, that can detect the presence of a cataract by analysing a smartphone picture of the eye. The app will then alert the user that a cataract has been found.
Any volunteer with a smartphone can use this application to go door-to-door, screening the elderly in their homes. Anyone who is found to have advanced cataracts can then be referred to health officials who can arrange further treatment.
The potential impact of this application is immense. The ability to conduct doorstep screening makes it possible to cover vast, remote areas and detect cataracts early. The potential outcome is reduced blindness rates and a much improved quality of life for many.
Bharath Sripathy,
Advisory, Senior Associate, PwC India
“This is a simple and convenient way to improve the detection of cataracts, reduce blindness and therefore deliver a better quality of life for elderly people. We are immensely proud to have been able to achieve this life-changing outcome.”
Contact us
Sarah Brown
Director, Global Corporate Affairs and Communications, PwC United Kingdom
Tel: +44 7384 248 785
