Accounting firm Deloitte LLP uses artificial intelligence to assess the skills of existing employees and develop plans to move employees from less popular departments to higher-demand positions. It's part of the professional services firm's broader bet that technology will allow it to moderate hiring growth over time.
Consulting giants are facing an unusual dilemma this year: Many of them are laying off hundreds of workers after hiring thousands of college graduates to meet new demand. Now, one of the largest consulting firms is looking to artificial intelligence to change that.
The moves come after Deloitte added 130,000 new employees this year. But during the hiring process, the company warned thousands of employees in the United States and Britain that their jobs were at risk as demand slowed and the company was forced to restructure parts of its operations.
"Being able to avoid the ups and downs of hiring and layoffs is obviously a great goal," said Stevan Rolls, Deloitte's global chief talent officer. "You can always find the right talent more efficiently and effectively." "
Deloitte and rival professional services firms have begun experimenting with using generative AI to eliminate repetitive, time-consuming tasks long reserved for junior employees, such as preparing documents for internal meetings or gathering reams of data for client pitches. Generative AI, popularized by ChatGPT, can generate sentences or articles in response to simple questions and compose those answers after being trained on a range of existing materials.
But with this latest project, they hope the technology will help them better manage the thousands of new employees they add each year.
After a hiring spree earlier this year, Deloitte's headcount has reached nearly 460,000. There are three times as many new hires as there were a decade ago, when revenue was about half what it is today.
"Let's imagine if Deloitte was so successful and we doubled in size, I would really worry about hiring 250,000 people a year," Rawls said. "It might not be less, but it might be as many as we're assuming right now."