PwC Canada’s Microsoft Alliance: Operationalizing AI to build trust and value

Authored by Rehan Aqeel, Partner, Microsoft Alliance PwC CanadaOpens in a new window

There is a phenomenon that has captured the world’s attention and created excitement in a way reminiscent of the early days of the internet: generative AI (Gen AI). This groundbreaking technology has sparked countless conversations about how it will revolutionize industries and the way work is performed.

As with any seismic shift, there has been some initial caution about this technological advancement’s wide-ranging impact. However, according to our 2023 Global Risk SurveyOpens in a new window, 60% of CEOs now see Gen AI mostly or fully as an opportunity rather than a risk. And within the next three years, nearly 60% of Canadian CEOs believe Gen AI will significantly change the way their company creates, captures and delivers value.  

As a business leader, it is important to implement this technology in an informed and responsible way. So how can the right firm help you determine where and how to begin?

PwC Canada has already embarked on transforming our operations with Gen AI. We have a long track record of investing in AI research and development, including our $200-million commitment to expanding our AI offerings.

Access to the most advanced Gen AI technology is precisely why we maintain key strategic alliances with leading technology companies, including Microsoft. Microsoft is making headwinds in the market, offering impactful solutions to organizations by making Gen AI adoptable, adaptable and applicable, and its proprietary access to OpenAI’s pioneering technology quickly brought AI-augmented capabilities to offerings such as Azure’s cloud services.

Prior to supporting businesses in deploying prebuilt, low-code solutions that accelerate and secure their generative AI journey, we experimented internally—breaking new ground in building, fine-tuning and rolling out tools and training programs to our 8,000 employees. This was exemplified by the implementation of Microsoft Copilot at PwC Canada, where only the firm’s internal data is used   to develop the model’s contextual awareness, generative capabilities, and language and understanding, while everything searched stays within this secure data set.

As a result, we’re well-positioned to advise Canadian organizations on the transformative potential generative AI tools like Microsoft Copilot can offer. It can streamline workflows, increase efficiency and boost employee productivity across core applications such as Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Teams and Outlook, as well as platforms such as GitHub and Dynamics 365—and having the support of an experienced team is vital in these pre-implementation stages.

PwC Canada provides end-to-end transformation services to many different organizations. We have seen firsthand that there are many applications for how and where Gen AI can be deployed—regulatory text classification in financial services, negation detection in life sciences, insurance pre-authorization in healthcare, text summarization and synthesis in marketing, and so much more.

For example, a large agriculture product manufacturer  sought to augment their internal capabilities with Gen AI. Their team wanted to be able to use dynamic, plain language queries to automatically retrieve insights and information from the organization’s unstructured repositories. Our team helped them configure and provision the cloud resources they needed through Microsoft Azure and OpenAI, as well as develop an architecture that could connect multiple environments while enabling confidential data to be collected, ingested and processed in a secure way. The project is just one example of the many existing use cases for Gen AI. 

At PwC Canada, we’re helping tomorrow’s AI leaders navigate the world of Gen AI safely, strategically and responsibly, and we rely on our five-step responsible AI framework to do so.  Without safeguards in place, Gen AI can pose significant risks to organizations. It can provide misleading statements, reinforce biases that exist in its training data and, in the worst cases, even disclose sensitive or proprietary information if data is not handled responsibly.

For this reason, data management is critical. Privacy and security must be prioritized at the start when working with any AI model, which is why we embed leading practices in privacy, security and data protection  into our approach. 

Pre-identification and early mitigation of Gen AI-related risks should be key considerations. Our team assists organizations by providing managed services  as an offering that supports project acceleration, from setting risk-based priorities around governance and compliance, to redesigning and automating security capabilities and reskilling teams to operationalize them. Our highly skilled workforce works alongside our clients to help them sustain outcomes in Gen AI. It is by embracing a human-led, tech-powered approach to Gen AI that helps us follow through on our vision to establish trust and deliver sustained outcomes. 

In 2023, organizations approached Gen AI inquisitively, and began to theorize on its application. Now, 2024 is the year to harness its potential holistically and implement it with intention, integrity and purpose.

Our alliance with Microsoft is committed to this axiom, helping Canadian organizations shape the future of responsible AI. We stay informed on the business, risk and regulatory landscapes, and respond with agility to the ever-changing environments in which we, and the businesses we work with, operate. Through it all, we strive to create a positive impact for our people and our clients, while building trust in society as a whole.