Episode 3 - Impact of AI on the workforce

Transcript

Laura Hinton: Hello and welcome to the latest episode of our bite size conversation series, Forces At Work. I'm Laura Hinton, head of Tax, Legal and People at PwC UK and I'm delighted that you're tuning in. We are living through an era of extraordinary change with so many forces at work. Technologies such as AI are becoming more powerful and intuitive. The geopolitical environment is complex and fast moving and the world and our clients are more interconnected than ever before. It's an exciting time to be in or entering the workforce. But what is the impact of AI on the workforce and what does a human-led, tech-powered organisation look like in reality? So I'm delighted to be joined today by Bivek Sharma, Chief Technology Officer for our Tax, Legal and People business to discuss these important issues. So Bivek welcome, it's great to have you here. So, so much discussion around AI in particular, the opportunities, the concerns, what's it all about, what are you hearing?

Bivek Sharma: It's an interesting one for me. I started life in tax way, way, way back when, over 25 years ago and moved into technology. I’ve lived through so many waves around technology and it's an interesting time actually because I could have said to you when I look at some of the waves in the past that we've had you could argue was it right to go first, the timing needed to be absolutely right, you needed the infrastructure in place... and actually AI has changed the rules of the games. I think just the level of disruption we're going to see, the level of transformation we're going to have to go through is unprecedented, I just haven't seen it before. So even if I look at it right now I don't think this is really going to be about, you know, can you opt out, I think you're in and this is really just about how do you get yourself ready for this and how do you get ahead of the curve. And so I think when we look at disruption as well it's really just about how I think you have to be a disruptor in this space or you going to be disrupted, and you really don't want to be second.

You know, we have lots of discussions and you and I have spoken about this in a way which is, ‘is it right always to be first?’ And I think sometimes we've said being second and seeing what's going to happen in the market, letting some of that pan out, the leading edge kind of moves. This time round I think it's different actually, I think you've got to be ahead of the game with the AI models. We're doing this to ourselves, aren't we? You know, with the deals we've done with Harvey, the announcement we've made with Open AI, with Chat GPT Enterprise, the deals we've done with Microsoft in getting our hands on the technology, beginning to use it for ourselves and rolling it out before anyone else. So it’s, for me as a CTO, exciting. I can talk the hind legs off a donkey, as you know anyway, but I genuinely think for the industry as a whole it's the most disruption we're going to see now over any other era, I think, the technology waves today.

Laura Hinton: So it's real I think is what you're saying?

Bivek Sharma: Yes, my long-winded way of saying, 'It is very real.' Yes.

Laura Hinton: It's here, it's now, it's an opportunity and I think you're right and, you know, without wishing to be flippant but there have been other, kind of, technology advances over the last few years, few decades that actually we've kind of seen them coming, we've ridden the wave a little bit and it was okay to let others go first, just see what happened. And sometimes things reached the potential that we thought they would but others didn't, but AI is here to stay, I think we would all agree with that. Whether that's as a consumer, whether that's as an employer, an employee, a large organisation, government, education, it's a factor of life. But there is something about speed and that's certainly something that we're focused on. What does it mean to be there first and be really as you say driving disruption as opposed to waiting for somebody to disrupt you? Which feels like a much better place to be from my perspective. At PwC we very much talk about, you know, human-led, tech-powered. What does that mean in the world of AI, what does that mean for workforce and disruption?

Bivek Sharma: Yes, never is there going to be a time where that phrase that we're just talking about, how relevant that's now going to become. Because I think we talk about how this is going to be a human led technology wave, we are going to have to become operators. So if we look at our service offering and other industries as well we are going to become the operators of AI. This huge amount of power we have, this corpus of data that we can now read and what we are able to do for our clients and each of the industry groups that are out there as well - we don't have anything that's equivocal to that. So I think when I, sort of, look at it and you look at what we've now got to do with our own workforces there's a huge amount of reskilling we're going to have to do which is obvious, but actually when you look at it we've got to go from traditional models to a model where we're AI augmented. Everything we do, right from the marketing and customer experience, all the way through to things like tax and HR legal services, that is going to change and the way we deliver that is going to change so we have to get our workforce skilled up in the right way. It's the way we're going to have to recruit as well, so associates today will not look like an associate two years from now.

Right now we'd say where an associate would get to in two or three years there is an argument to say in the two years with the speed of AI and what we're already witnessing right now just over the roll out of the last six months that associate will be doing the work of a senior associate or a manager a lot quicker. They're going to have to upskill. There's reshaping the organisation and what we have to do around that, but also then there are new skills that we're going to need to bring in. We're going to have to think about knowledge in a different way as well, all this IP that we have within our organisation. How do we start training models - so people who can train models, who can operate these models and the technology there that we're going to need then to build a kind of platform sitting on top of these large language models that are coming out? So from a workforce perspective, there's going to be some huge changes around what we need to do. And again it is human-led, this idea that technology is just going to come and take over, that's entirely not true. And what it's giving us is huge power and to deliver a lot more insight and a lot more quickly, but we still need to build the infrastructure around it and we still need to build the layers around it.

And with that comes all the guard rails and all the risk management pieces we need to do as well. So I think from a workforce perspective, getting ready for this is of huge importance right now and doing this now, this isn't a ‘we'll wait for a year or so’, this is a ‘start planning now, top down’. What is this going to do to our organisation, what are the changes that are going to happen, what do we need to do to be fit for purpose for our clients going forward and how do we now need to shape our organisation to the skills-based organisation of the future? What does that need to look like? And getting that ready now and starting those exercises now is absolutely critical.

Laura Hinton: So what I think you're saying is we don't all have to become technologists, we don't all have it become data scientists, but actually we do all have to embrace this is as a topic from a personal upskilling perspective. Understand it, understand how it's relevant to us as individuals, the organisations that we work within so that we can embrace the opportunities. And it's interesting there's a lot of research out there - I know our own Hopes and Fears Survey said that 'From a UK perspective I think UK workers see less opportunity in AI. They're less excited about the opportunities and the jobs that will be created, but also see less disruption.' And those two things I'm sure are connected, they don't necessarily see that their roles in jobs will be disrupted, but I think what we are saying is that every walk of life will have an element of AI and we need to think about what that means.

But it doesn't mean we're replacing humans and I think that's really important to us as an organisation, it's important to me personally that we've got this human element and hopefully, it means more space and time to do the things that only humans can do. That kind of ingenuity, that creativity, the judgement-building relationships, translating the insights and data. Arguably a lot of the tasks that AI will focus on will be those things that don't define careers anyway, they're the the things that we do in our first one, two, three years of a career that we would happily hand off, but we need to think about jobs and tasks in a different way don't we, well what do you do instead?

Bivek Sharma: And it's something that we've been talking about. It'd be great just to, kind of, get your take on it. I mean we've lived through-, our careers have spanned similar sort of time spans, haven't they? But just if you look through all the waves we've been through with technology, we've had dotcom, we've had the move to Cloud, we've had all these hyper automations like the Alteryx of the world and the RPAs. I mean just your take, and we've spoken about this, what does that mean and what lessons have we learnt for this new AI world? It’s kind of interesting getting your take on that.

Laura Hinton: Yes, and I think, you know, notwithstanding, I think it is different this time, there are things that we can look back on and use as guidance for the future I think. I will say never underestimate the power of the, kind of, human spirit, human ingenuity and humanness and humility, I think that is even more important in an AI-driven world. I think knowledge, knowing things, knowing facts is far less important now than it will be in the future. That said it's still really important and especially as a professional services firm we have a journey to go on and we're through that journey or moving through that journey around what will differentiate us in the future isn't what we know. It's how we apply it, it's what we do with that knowledge, how do we pool our knowledge and our data as an organisation to genuinely get to a better and different answer for our clients.

So I think it's building on some of the experiences, but it's that growth mindset to some extent around being really open to new ways of doing things and avoiding falling into the trap of, well this is how we did it even last year, even last month. The world is moving very quickly, so I think very much focusing on values within an organisation as leaders, how do we create the right environment for success? I think that is as important now if not moreso than it's always been. As an employer how do we give people access to material to upskill themselves? Time, space to think? To make mistakes actually. I think if we are really pushing the technology agenda and AI it's not all going to work. And that's quite difficult for people who've been used to right and wrong and knowledge to get their heads around that you'll try something and it will fail. So creating an environment where that's okay, we learn the lessons and we move on. So I think a lot of the elements around culture, around the environment, collaboration, sharing ideas, humanness are as important now in this new AI-driven world. So I don't think we are going entirely into the unknown but it's that mindset I think that makes the biggest difference.

Bivek Sharma: And it's important, right, because we've talked about this. Because I think if people are sitting there thinking that this is really just an efficiency drive and they're genuinely worried about what is this going to do to for workforce, I think they're getting it wrong. And the one thing that technology waves in the past have shown us is productivity only goes one way which is up and expectations from the markets are going to increase with AI. We're going to have to do more and we're going to have to do it quicker. So if anything the argument would be I think at the end of this we're going to need even more people aren't we rather than the other way around. So I think culturally the way to think about it is exactly the way you described it.

Laura Hinton: Yes. And I think to some extent just having this conversation, having a bit of time and space to think about it. What are the implications, what are the unintended consequences? One of the areas that I'm particularly passionate about is the whole broader inclusion and diversity agenda. What does this mean, people that have access to AI and tools early on in the adoption cycle or those that come to it later?

Are we creating another set of inequality in society? And I think to some extent technology is a great leveller, this is new to everybody so nobody has been born into an innate advantage around some of this technology and that's a fantastic opportunity. But as employers, we have to be responsible in terms of how we think about that coming back to that upskilling and human element to make sure we're not creating inequalities in different parts of our society. So some of those things just need time and space to work through, and they're complex and interconnected with lots of other issues. But for you maybe in a nutshell, you know, future-proofing your workforce, if you were advising somebody coming into the workforce now what would you be saying technology can really do?

Bivek Sharma: I think, think of technology as your augmenter. How's it going to transform what you can do for your clients, how's it going to add more value to what you're doing? And that might be better experiences, more value, more insights. And then working out how you now need to shape your organisation around it and that is how are you recruiting, how are you upskilling resources, what is that journey going to look like? So I think it is that skills-based organisation of the future, so you understand what we need to do in the market, where that disruption is going to come from. It's there, you've just got to now get your arms around that.

And then making sure pretty quickly you have the skill force, the workforce you need with the skills you need to really deliver on the back of it. And that makes your workforce resilient, and it makes sure we're actually attracting workforce. If you look at our kids they're growing up with this, it's just normal for them, and then to step into an organisation which is then six months or a year behind, that's disappointing and they're going to expect that there. And actually to attract workforce, to attract the talent of the future they're going to expect us to be ahead for the game here, so I think getting all of that right is going to be absolutely crucial.

Laura Hinton: Yes, I couldn't agree more, I think this is such an important area not only for our existing talent, but as you say for those people coming into the workforce. And managing some expectations as well, I mean AI is not a magic wand, AI's expensive, actually access to the tools and the processing power and everything that that involves. It's not as if suddenly we can do a whole load of stuff, you know, with no expense, there is a cost that comes with. So balancing that with the, kind of, human cost, impact on jobs and what being a large employer in particular really means. I think there's lots of fascinating topics for leaders to be thinking about in that whole arena of AI. As we've said, we could talk about this for hours but we are out of time. But thank you for sharing your thoughts and insights, it's fascinating as always. And thank you to all of you for tuning in. We have got so many experts across our business so please do reach out to us if you would like to hear more. Thanks everyone and see you next time.

Speakers

• Laura Hinton, Head of Tax, Legal and Workforce
• Bivek Sharma, Tax Chief Technology Officer