TL;DR:
- Deloitte uses artificial intelligence to reevaluate employee skills and reallocate them to high-demand roles.
- The firm aims to avoid large fluctuations in hiring and layoffs.
- AI is already being used to streamline repetitive tasks traditionally assigned to junior staff.
- Deloitte’s workforce has tripled in size over the past decade.
- The firm seeks to maintain efficient growth while leveraging AI technology.
Main AI News:
In the world of consulting giants, a unique challenge has emerged this year: despite their recent influx of college graduates to meet growing demands, many are now facing the need to lay off hundreds of existing staff. Deloitte LLP, one of the industry’s heavyweights, is charting a distinctive course by turning to artificial intelligence to address this issue.
Deloitte is harnessing the power of AI to assess the skills of its current workforce and formulate strategies for transitioning employees from less active sectors of the business to roles that are currently in high demand. This forward-thinking approach is part of the firm’s broader strategy to leverage technology in order to moderate its hiring practices in the long term.
These initiatives come in the wake of Deloitte’s substantial addition of 130,000 new staff members this year. However, amid this hiring spree, the company issued warnings to thousands of employees in the US and UK about the potential redundancy of their positions due to the necessity of restructuring certain areas in response to a slowdown in demand.
Stevan Rolls, the global chief talent officer at Deloitte, emphasized the firm’s aspiration to achieve a more balanced approach, stating, “It is obviously a great objective to be able to avoid large swings of hirings and layoffs. You could always be more efficient and effective about finding the right people.“
Deloitte and other professional services firms are already exploring the use of generative artificial intelligence to streamline repetitive and time-consuming tasks that were traditionally assigned to junior staff members, such as document preparation for internal meetings and data gathering for client presentations. This innovative technology, popularized by the likes of ChatGPT, generates coherent responses based on extensive training with existing materials.
With their latest initiatives, these firms are looking to AI to help them efficiently manage the continuous influx of thousands of new employees each year. Deloitte’s total workforce now nears an impressive 460,000 after this year’s hiring spree, marking a threefold increase in new hires compared to a decade ago, when revenue levels were roughly half of what they are today.
As Rolls contemplates the future, he notes, “Let’s imagine Deloitte was so successful and we doubled our size again, I’d be really worried about hiring a quarter of a million people a year. It might not be fewer, but it might be the same as we hire now.” In embracing AI, Deloitte seeks to navigate this growth with agility and foresight.
Conclusion:
Deloitte’s strategic embrace of artificial intelligence for workforce optimization reflects a forward-thinking approach to the market. By using AI to adapt and allocate resources efficiently, Deloitte aims to maintain sustainable growth while staying responsive to changing market dynamics. This proactive use of technology sets a precedent for the industry, signaling the potential for more agile and adaptable professional services firms in the future.
