Artificial Intelligence (AI)

AI has the potential to create significant economic and societal benefits for businesses, governments and individuals worldwide. But with great potential comes great risk: are your algorithms making decisions that align with your values? Do customers trust you with their data? Will your brand be tarnished if you can’t explain how your AI systems work?

Answering these questions is a responsibility that falls on all of us: board members, CEOs, business unit heads and AI specialists alike. PwC’s Responsible AI Toolkit—a suite of customisable frameworks, tools and templates ranked by Fast Company as a World Changing Idea, and winner of several awards at CogX—can help your organisation harness the power of AI in an ethical and responsible manner.

Think that AI is hard? Turns out, you’re right. Companies are investing, creating and deploying AI models using approaches more suited for traditional software development, but AI models are living artifacts that must be continuously improved and maintained. Traditional approaches struggle with efficient model production, and may result in missed opportunities and value decay.

What are ways Conversational AI and natural language processing (NLP) can be used to interact with customers, employees, and processes more easily? Conversational AI and natural language processing is moving beyond just consumer-facing virtual assistants into the enterprise space to help us work smarter and faster. Natural language machine learning techniques can be applied to unstructured audio and text data to extract information, analyse patterns and even generate sentences.

PwC's Conversational AI and NLP services and accelerators enable companies to satisfy customer and employee expectations while lowering costs. Using a combination of reusable assets, pre-trained models, and bespoke capabilities, we solve a wide range of information extraction problems for our clients. From invoice processing to contracts review, we can build or tailor the solution needed.  Our solutions help reduce operational complexities, improve customer service, engage customers, and streamline internal processes.

How can we make better decisions in such an uncertain world? Uncertainties and disruptions are leading to a lack of confidence in strategy. AI-powered predictive models and simulation tools can help leaders quickly test strategic scenarios to make better decisions faster.

Traditional analytic approaches to strategy rely on “predict-and-act” models that are narrow in scope and inadequate to support the development of adaptive strategy. In contrast, simulation models focus on the dynamics of market development and the “new economics” of the value network created by innovation. PwC can help companies establish systems thinking practices to capture the richness of alternative futures, leverage strategic and operational simulation models at scale to help reveal strategies that are robust and minimise regret across many different futures.

How can the same capabilities used to improve customer experience and increase productivity benefit the broader society? With the increasing maturity of AI technology, there is potential to use AI to solve some of our society’s most pressing problems. Globally, 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.

We have helped not-for-profits and major organisations by simulating the network effects and economic benefit of including women in the workforce in emerging nations, researching the potential benefits of AI on our environment, and modeling the impact of planting a tree in a specific area on carbon footprint.