EY and IBM team up on AI to automate HR processes

Today, consulting major EY announced it is expanding its partnership with IBM to provide enterprises with an AI solution aimed at automating HR tasks and processes.

Officially dubbed EY.ai Workforce, the offering will tap IBM’s watsonx technology and enable HR teams to streamline their workflows with AI — right from drafting a job description to handling payrolls — and drive efficiencies.

The move marks EY’s latest AI team-up, following the launch of the EY.ai platform last month, leveraging tech from Microsoft, OpenAI, Dell Technologies, IBM, SAP, ServiceNow, Thomson Reuters and UiPath, and follows the general trend of consulting firms such as McKinsey and BCG also offering enterprise-grade AI tools to clients.

“The modern workplace is evolving rapidly and there’s a pressing need for streamlined operations,” said Andy Baldwin, EY’s global managing partner for client service, in a statement. “EY.ai Workforce reimagines ways of working by facilitating businesses to make the most of their talent, putting humans at the center of technology to bring about an improved work experience with superior productivity.”

What does EY.ai Workforce bring to the table?

EY.ai Workforce combines AI and automation capabilities from IBM’s watsonx Orchestrate with EY’s domain knowledge in HR transformation and business processes to provide enterprises with a tailor-made offering for handling HR tasks.

IBM Watsonx Orchestrate connects to multiple apps and tools, like Gmail, Salesforce and Workday, and leverages automation, natural language processing and machine learning to automate routine HR workflows.

This way, when integrated with EY.ai, it can help client employees with a range of tasks, including drafting job descriptions, sending follow-up communications, extracting payroll reports and analyzing feedback surveys. All they’ll have to do is type in a request to the AI of what’s required. 

Along with EY, SAP and Oracle have also made their moves to automate HR functions with AI. The former has integrated Microsoft’s AI Copilot and Azure OpenAI Service to streamline talent management for its customers, while the latter has added generative AI to its Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management (HCM) offering, underpinned by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)

More to come from EY

While EY.ai Workforce will streamline HR processes, it is safe to say that this will not be the only function EY plans to improve with AI for its clients. With a wide range of alliances already announced for the EY.ai platform, the company will add more capabilities in the coming days. 

So far, it has invested $1.4 billion as the foundation for the platform, including embedding AI into proprietary EY technologies like EY Fabric — used by 60,000 EY clients and more than 1.5 million unique client users — as well as funding a series of cloud and automation technology acquisitions. It is also working to launch its own secure, large language model called EY.ai EYQ following an internal pilot.

According to McKinsey’s research, with generative AI’s implementation, retail and consumer packaged goods companies alone could see an additional $400 billion to $660 billion in operating profits annually. Across sectors, it has the potential to generate $2.6 trillion to $4.4 trillion in global corporate profits.