Harry Goddard

First of all, thanks very much for the opportunity to talk to you about this.

It's a really exciting topic.

AI has been a feature of the consulting environment for probably 15, 20 years.

But I think it's really with ChatGPT that it's really captured people's imagination.

And the thing that's most significant about AI is the pace of change as opposed to just necessarily the capability of the technology.

In a professional services environment, we're a knowledge economy, in effect, and ChatGPT, generative AI, really plays into providing greater access to knowledge in a much more consumable and accessible format.

I think that's to be proven, to be honest with you, Tom.

I think at a very practical level, what we're seeing is that technologies, and we wouldn't use necessarily any one particular vendor's technology because we would adopt any of these existing Gen AI platforms internally.

But what we're seeing is it's an accelerant to our people.

And what's critically important for us as we deploy the technology internally is that our people are able to use it effectively, that we continue to be able to bring that same degree of trust and confidence in the services that we provide into the marketplace.

And what we're at a very practical level experiencing is, I'll give you a very practical example.

We're using AI technology in the deployment of technology solutions.

We have one very specific example of a use case that would typically take about 3,000 hours.

Now it takes about eight minutes.

So real value to our clients, but also in terms of our people, it's really accelerating their ability to be more productive, more effective.

One of the things I say to people all of the time is to remember AI is expensive and the cost to deploy the technology, the cost to use the services is significant.

So what we're going to see in our profession is a transformation of our commercial model away from one that's really driven by time and hours and one that's much more driven by outcomes with our clients, which will be delivered through a mixture of human talent, insight, relationships, acumen and technology.

Absolutely.

And as the largest professional services in the world, we are undertaking what is probably one of the largest transformation programmes in the world as we seek to transform our organisation to embed technology in how we serve our clients in the marketplace.

ensure that our people are equipped to take advantage of that effectively, and also support our clients as they go through this transition as well.