Acculturation to Generative AI: BDO Teams Train in This New Technology and Define Business Use Cases
Understanding the Impact of AI and Measuring Its Contribution to Audit, Consulting, and Accounting Professions
BDO, an international network of accounting, tax, consulting, and advisory firms, faced the crucial challenge of understanding generative Artificial Intelligence. The teams needed to become familiar with, explore the possibilities, and understand the limitations of this technology to enable them to project onto concrete cases. The goal was to significantly increase the productivity of their teams.
From Theoretical Explanation to Concrete Familiarization for a Non-Technical Audience
Generative AI is a transformative technology that manifests at all levels. For the non-specialist teams at BDO, the challenge was to grasp not only the theoretical basics of AI but also its business challenges, value, and benefits. Once these concepts were acquired (state of the art, terminology, application), BDO specialists, supported by our experts, would be better equipped to establish usage scenarios by aligning functionalities, data sources, and potential ROI.
Developing a Comprehensive and Concrete AI Strategy Through a Collaborative Approach and Building a Roadmap Approved by Stakeholders
After a familiarization workshop aimed at understanding the fundamental concepts of generative AI, four brainstorming workshops brought together various internal functions of the company to think about concrete use cases. These workshops helped describe existing business processes, identifying tasks that could be improved or automated using generative AI. The identified use cases were analyzed in terms of potential return on investment, exploitable data sources, and key performance indicators to monitor. Two types of use cases were studied: those with a cross-functional impact affecting multiple functions and those specific to a particular profession.
Envisioning the Technological, Data, and Consulting Building Blocks Needed to Realize the Defined AI Strategy
Based on the potential use cases, our teams were able to list the initial building blocks required to implement an AI strategy. The necessary steps for its proper execution were also established. In parallel, the development of a prototype was proposed to quickly realize the first benefits of these technologies.