COVER STORY
Deloitte Exec On AI’s ‘Inflection Point’ And The Importance Of Its Partnership With Google Cloud Consulting and IT services giant Deloitte is now building new generative AI solutions with Google Cloud to drive opportunities for enterprises around the world. “Clearly, we are at an inflection point in terms of technology evolution and AI in general,” said Deloitte’s Gopal Srinivasan, who helps lead the company’s new Generative AI practice. In an interview with CRN , Srinivasan explains Deloitte’s strategy of workforce transformation with generative AI, its Google Cloud partnership and the company’s AI goals.—By Mark Haranas
What are some generative AI use cases with Google Cloud that are driving enterprise sales? After a long time, enterprises are looking across the entire business to say, ‘Where can we drive productivity and optimize how we run our business?Where can we capture new revenue and growth through hyper-personalization and better customer engagement?’ While all of that encompasses many specific use cases, where the power of the Deloitte-Google partnership is unique is that generative AI is not going to exist in isolation. You still need to plug it into the workflows of the enterprise, you still need to harness the private data that the enterprise has and train those models. This is going to require that workforces within businesses are reskilled and reallocated to areas where currently we’ve been going through a period of labor shortage in several areas.And these technologies allow you to drive more productivity, but it’s also going to require proactive workforce transformation. TrustworthyAI is one of Deloitte’s offerings in theAI domain. This allows us to combine what Google is introducing from a technology standpoint to enable compliance, privacy, data security, etc. with our principles, policies and processes to allow a company to use AI responsibly. So customers can have trust in what is being delivered. That’s something our partnership delivers. How is Deloitte helping customers around workforce transformation in regard to generative AI? There are three aspects when it comes to workforce trans- formation. One is as we apply these technologies to rapidly rethink our business processes, what does it mean for the people who are performing these processes today? How do they relearn that new way of doing things and ensure that they are working with the technology?A lot of the benefit of generativeAI is about augmenting human capability and advancing it. So that also requires humans to relearn the way they do things. So how you get your workforce to learn to work withAI and take advantage ofAI capabilities is No. 1. The second is this is going to lead to things that you’ve never done before in an organization. For instance, today, there are
several silos of data across the organization. Enterprises, in a sense, have given up trying on even getting a unified view of that data. But with generative AI and Google’s new enterprise search solutions, now we have the possibility of being able to look into all of these stores of data, look at patterns across them, and be able to retrieve insights that previously had been a huge challenge, both in terms of costs and also just the sheer feasibility of doing it.You need people that are applyingAI to do all of these things and making that insight available. What’s the third important aspect of workforce transformation around generative AI? As you get more into deploying these technologies, drivingAI fluency and skill sets in your workforce is going to be critical. ... We are helping our clients, along with Google, to start from the top and look across the organization at how their operat- ing model changes, how the workforce needs to be reskilled, and ensure that—as they apply this technology—they can do it rapidly and continue to run the business by managing the transition in an effective manner. In terms of generative AI market di erentiation, what is Google Cloud doing better than others? This question comes up a lot when we speak to our enterprise clients, ‘How can I be sure that these models are not training themselves on my data and those capabilities become available to our competitors?’ Right out of the gate, what Google is saying is, ‘Our models will not do that.Without your consent or explicit permission, your data will stay within your walls. Whatever private data the model gets trained on is applied only on your use cases and within your organization.’ That is a strong market differentiation that has seen a lot of interest and more confidence in moving forward with deploy- ing generative AI in the enterprise.
Also, Google’s model is not just one model that can do a lot of things generally OK, but several models that can do specific things really well. Scan here to read the full interview.
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