EY launches AI platform and LLM after $1.4 billion investment

Today professional services leader EY announced the launch of EY.ai, a comprehensive platform to help clients boost AI adoption. The platform brings together an AI ecosystem with a range of capabilities, with alliances with companies including Microsoft (which provided EY with early access to Azure OpenAI capabilities, such as GPT-3 and GPT-4), Dell Technologies, IBM, SAP, ServiceNow, Thomson Reuters and UiPath.

The company said 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 funding a series of cloud and automation technology acquisitions. The announcement also included the fact that following an initial pilot with 4,200 EY technology-focused team members, EY will be releasing a secure, large language model called EY.ai EYQ.

EY CTO has weighed in on ‘killer use case’ of gen AI

The announcement comes almost exactly eight months since VentureBeat spoke to EY’s global chief technology officer, Nicola Morini Bianzino, about the “killer use case” of generative AI in the enterprise. Bianzino told VentureBeat in January that this would be around generative AI’s impact on knowledge management, that he described as the “dialectic of AI.”

“When you think about an organization like ours, we have 360,000 people, we have lots of tools and capabilities built in the more than 100 years of our history,” he said at the time. “But that knowledge is distributed now, you can’t really touch it; it’s the soul of our organization, but it’s immaterial.” If you could systematize it into an ontology and make it part of a technology solution, you can increase enterprise value significantly, he continued.

New AI offerings help provide ‘treasure map’ for enterprises

In an interview today with VentureBeat, Bianzino said that EY’s new proprietary AI offerings offer its clients “a level of confidence” in AI capabilities that are suitable for the enterprise.

“What we want to do with EY.ai is based on countless interactions and conversations as people start to understand the potential impact of this technology but are asking us, ‘how would you measure the future compliance of these solutions?’” he explained. “That’s where we have a very strong ability to help clients develop a valid framework, assess the maturity of the organization, and then offer a roadmap that allows clients to deploy AI with confidence.”

It is, he said, almost a “treasure map” to help enterprise clients embark — and succeed — on their AI journey.