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Kevin Sullivan
Global and US Oracle Practice Leader, PwC US
Artificial intelligence (AI) is fundamentally transforming business operations, and businesses are starting to see returns. Nearly half (49%) of technology leaders in PwC’s October 2024 Pulse Survey said that AI was “fully integrated” into their companies’ core business strategy. A third said AI was fully integrated into products and services. As AI rapidly advances, enterprises should embrace an AI strategy so they can stay competitive — whether their goal is to enhance productivity, reinvent functions to lower costs, or develop AI-driven products and services that transform their business models.
The financial services company has been modernizing its enterprise technology stack for years, even acquiring an AI company to improve its capabilities. The company sees a huge demand for AI use cases and capabilities across its business. After careful evaluation, the organization decided to prioritize human-in-the-loop use cases with a holistic modernization program for its front- and back-office functions. For this financial services organization, it was all about creating tools and systems that help its employees do their jobs more easily and efficiently.
For example, the company discovered that a significant amount of friction in its customer service process arose when agents needed to put a customer on hold to clarify the next action to take. The company leveraged AI in its Oracle applications to develop a generative AI-powered virtual assistant for its contact center, which helps prevent the need to put a customer on hold and can reduce the time-to-resolution to seconds.
Data is at the heart of what finance does — and the financial services company’s data management strategy has always been at the core of its transformation journey. In finance, professionals spend a lot of time inputting data and generating reports. Because the company had invested in traditional AI, data, and cloud capabilities with its Oracle products, it was well positioned to “flip the script” and use generative AI to enable its employees to spend more time on insights and less on inputs. The clean core and trustworthy data provided by Oracle Fusion applications helped set the company’s AI initiatives up for success from day one.
As one of the world’s largest global IT companies began deploying its large language model in a wide variety of consumer use cases, the company worked hard to confirm that risk management was well considered in its AI models. For example, the company integrated a safety mechanism into its large language model to help prevent users from retrieving harmful answers by filtering out problematic questions. The safety model’s taxonomy is designed to recognize serious queries — it can distinguish whether a question is about biological warfare or academic chemistry, for instance. The organization is committed to providing Responsible AI across all its products, and a big part of achieving that is often forging industry AI alliances that focus on developing policies, benchmarks, and tools to help confirm Responsible AI usage.
In addition to technological initiatives such as cybersecurity evaluations and industry AI alliances, Responsible AI requires cultural initiatives which includes a leadership driven approach to governance and a holistic change management strategy. Finance is a heavily regulated industry, and the financial services company has taken a careful approach to managing its risk and governance. By instituting a structured approach to governing AI and involving senior leaders at the earliest stages of the process, the company has set itself up to innovate and adopt AI quickly across its enterprise landscape.
The Tech company was one of the first to open-source a large language model, making it available on Oracle Cloud. The initiative aimed to enable organizations to use its model at scale, with PwC and Oracle providing specialized knowledge for further fine-tuning, deployment and model distillation for effective use cases. This infrastructure provided a seamless tool for engineering teams to use large language models in their own projects.
Similarly, the financial services company’s use of AI embedded in Oracle’s products, such as Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), positions the company to take advantage of the possibilities of AI. Working with PwC, the company moved to production and improved the customer experience while increasing employee efficiency.
"PwC's approach is to embed AI in everything — whether it’s within processes, systems, or products — there’s an intrinsic expectation now that AI will play a role."
Emmanuelle Rivet, Chief Risk Officer at PwCThese real-world use cases illustrate how organizations can innovate their way forward in the rapidly evolving world of AI. Generative AI holds tremendous transformation potential, and working with PwC enables companies to leverage embedded AI in Oracle applications and custom-built AI solutions to begin strategizing their AI initiatives. With PwC’s industry knowledge and its investment in developing use cases on the Oracle platform, businesses can accelerate breakthrough performance in their AI transformation.
Get in touch with us to learn how PwC and Oracle can help you achieve more with sector-specific, multi-functional AI — fueling innovation and driving your organization forward.