for questions from human agents—from 47 percent to 80 percent. EY will continue to train the chatbot through prompt engineering and cleansing the data that powers it to improve accuracy. “It’s been a tremendous success,” Little said.“We saw a real oppor- tunity to disrupt.And we’ve done it. … It’s going to give us a great market advantage and learning that we can continue to leverage.” PwC’s Proofs Of Concept Like WinWire, PwC—a global systems integrator, Microsoft solu- tion provider and 2023 Microsoft Partner of The Year—has joined Microsoft on the event trail, educating hundreds of financial ser- vices, health-care, energy and utilities customers on generative AI. “We’re involved in client delivery work across almost every
code optimization—improving efficiency by as much as 50 percent. In human resources, generative AI has helped with job postings, performance management and other tasks.And in IT, it has saved workers from answering low-level questions. “It also helps end users who actually just don’t know what they want, but they know how to say it,” he said. “And so they don’t know how to run SQL, but they do know how to ask for things.” When introducing generative AI to a customer, PwC looks for areas of constraint, he said. “There’s a financial services company I’ve been talking to, and they’re just excited because there are certain parts of their business that they’re about to grow drastically as interest rates change,” he said. “And they want to scale up and go faster without hiring a
sector, and certainly pro- posals in every single sector,” Bret Greenstein, PwC U.S. data and ana- lytics partner, told CRN . “[There is] just a huge vol- ume of discussions to help people think this through. It’s one of the fastest sales cycles I’ve ever seen, but at the same time it’s highly transformative. So the
million people. And they couldn’t find them if they wanted to. So this ability for a midsize company to amplify their business or to scale their workforce is pretty powerful.” The key for customers is that generativeAI won’t solve everything, he said. “If you just let everyone build a chatbot, you’re just
‘[ ere is] just a huge volume of discussions to help people think this through. It’s one of the fastest sales cycles I’ve ever seen, but at the same time it’s highly transformative.’ — Bret Greenstein, U.S. Data, Analytics Partner, PwC
work is actually really hard. But [customers get interested very quickly] because it’s not as if anyone has to be convinced that generative AI matters or is going to be disruptive to business.” Some of the early generative AI use cases include offloading work from contact center agents, having AI collect the customer’s problem, answer the customer if the problem is lower level and automate service ticket processing. PwC has seen reductions of work for employees of up to 80 percent. “These are often workflows where there are inbound communica- tions coming in,” he said.“And previously, there was not a good way to vet inbound service tickets, service requests, insurance claims, requests—whatever comes in always comes in as email, text or some workflow. And it was so hard to automate that because you can’t do that with just a bunch of clicks or code. But generative AI does a nice job of reading, so to speak, incoming unstructured text and then characterizing high, middle, low risk and then even resolving some of the issues automatically. “So we had some processes where we’re just seeing an 80 per- cent drop in what goes to the actual person, which allows the person to focus on the harder cases and the easy ones or the incomplete requests get handled automatically. … Even the communication back to people with natural language is a really cool process that speeds up the experience, reduces the labor, allows people to scale.” In mergers and acquisitions, generative AI has helped leverage and analyze unstructured data used in complex due diligence, Greenstein said. In sales, it has helped internal sellers support customer needs and questions. In software development, generative AI has helped with creation, testing, evaluation, documentation and
going to get a lot of noise and not a lot of high quality,” he said. “But if you create a solution that trains people how to build high-quality customer service, you can adapt it to HR or to other things.” A generative AI solution brings in just about every technology discipline at PwC, he said. These include the cloud, infrastructure, security, applications, data, business functional operations such as finance and IT, and then sector-based use cases as well. “This is the greatest unifier for us because we all have to come together for clients to help them,” he said. Copilot Conversations Open New Doors Mike Wilson, CTO and partner at Mason, Ohio-based Microsoft partner Interlink Cloud Advisors—a member of CRN ’s 2023 Managed Service Provider 500—told CRN that his company has used the hype around Microsoft 365 Copilot to educate customers on Microsoft’s other generative AI wares. Azure OpenAI, Azure Cognitive Services, Syntex and Power Platform’s form recognition capabilities are some of those wares. Wilson and his customers have even talked about how individual job roles may change with generative AI. “There are a lot of otherAI technologies that exist,” he said. “So there’s a possibility here when we’re looking at readiness around things like Copilot to also start looking across their business. … We can go through and do that business consulting, look role by role in your organization, identify AI use cases.” An eventual conversation with customers is how MSPs that adopt generative AI may even need to change billing because of the increase to productivity, he said.
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