India central to EY’s AI strategy: Truncale

BENGALURU: Janet Truncale, global chair and CEO of EY, said the professional services firm’s India operations are increasingly becoming central to its global AI strategy, with more than a quarter of its four lakh employees based in the country and its workforce here being among some of the fastest adopters of new technologies.

That importance was underlined on Thursday with Truncale launching the EY.ai Centre for Reimagination in Bengaluru, a client experience centre designed to help companies move from isolated AI pilots to full-scale business transformation. The centre is part of EY’s planned $1.4 bn investment in AI.

In an exclusive interaction with TOI, Truncale said the choice of India was deliberate. “The adoption of technology by our workforce in India is like no other. They understand it because they’re living it – this is a tech hub, right! And it’s always been the innovation centre for us.”

The centre is intended to show clients what AI can do across sectors such as retail, banking, manufacturing, healthcare and life sciences. And help them see how AI can reshape business models, operating models and customer experience. Truncale said EY is also using itself as “client zero”.

She said the firm has been clear that it must transform its own businesses before advising clients. The biggest example is audit. EY built a global audit platform, Canvas, a decade ago for its 160,000 clients and more than 100,000 audit professionals. It is now putting agentic AI on top of that platform.

That, she said, is not a small use case – “it’s end to end”. It manages workflow, it manages the accounting and auditing knowledge for everyone on the system. An auditor who earlier had to consult manuals to understand how to audit a banking allowance for loan losses can now ask an assurance agent and get guidance in real time. EY is doing similar work in tax, where its knowledge catalogue has been “agentified” by country.

Many global analysts expect such agentification to have a big impact on the talent requirements of professional services firms, including in their consulting businesses. Asked about this, Truncale said AI is changing the kind of work the employees and consultants do, but said it’s in no way reducing the need for junior talent. “Every one of our businesses is relying on bringing in new skills, new perspectives, kids from college. The question is, how fast can you get them to operate at a higher level and not do the menial work.

“I feel very strongly that academia has to prepare folks for this new tech-enabled workforce better. Some countries and some universities get that more so than others,” she said. Ajay Anand, managing partner for EY Global Delivery Services (GDS), said just in the last year, GDS hired 25,000 people, many of them from campuses.

Truncale said opportunities are also rising, and pointed to one of those. Boards, she said, are asking how they can make decisions using real data and synthetic data, how they should control agents working alongside humans.

Ready to Make a Smarter Property Decision? Build Your Legacy with TOI Homes.