Deloitte Provides Employees with New AI Chatbot, PairD

In a bid to boost productivity, Deloitte is providing 75,000 employees across Europe and the Middle East with a new generative AI chatbot aimed at assisting with emails, PowerPoints, and more. The Financial Times reported that the firm launched an internal AI and it’s called “PairD.”

According to the paper, this is another signal that the adoption of AI will continue to scale across industries. Launched back in October in the UK, PairD’s arrival came with a bit of caution to employees as they were warned that the AI still could produce inaccurate information.

With that said, employees were given the green light so long as they were willing to validate the “accuracy and completeness” of the output generated by PairD. With AI’s use expanding in multiple industries, there have been a few examples of the pitfalls of not double-checking generated content.

In one case, a lawyer in New York tasked ChatGPT to help write up some research for a case. The problem was that the AI had a case of hallucination and cited cases and case law that didn’t exist. As one could imagine the judge in that case wasn’t amused.

What makes Deloitte’s move interesting though, unlike other firms or even other companies who sought out companies such as OpenAI, and IBM to build their AIs, Deloitte chose to develop PairD internally by utilizing the firm’s AI institute.

This internal rollout can also signal the desire for greater domain-specific AI technology, not general-use LLMs. But overall, this is a pretty big move. As one of the Big Four in the accounting world, Deloitte’s move will likely be followed by their rivals in the near future.

Though fellow Big Four rival, PwC is currently using AI chatbots in its legal and tax divisions to push through higher productivity demands, PwC’s chatbot was developed in collaboration with Harvey, a generative AI startup that got seed funding from OpenAI.

But not everything is good news. The push for AI across the economy comes as firms, and companies seek to reduce costs associated with labor and some are looking toward AI as a means of weathering economic uncertainty.

Originally posted on OpenDataScience.com

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