PwC: Applying AI to transform efficiency and advising clients from a position of experience on solving real-world problems

The Opportunity

Adopting new technology early to keep PwC and its clients ahead

PwC’s mission is to help clients transform to build enduring success as they navigate a rapidly changing world. The firm’s purpose is to build trust in society and solve important problems. It likes to be client-zero with any new technology: using it in-house first before offering it to clients so it can advise them based on first-hand knowledge.

PwC is a network of firms. When it brings in a new technology, the challenge is getting the buy-in of all the member firms. To achieve this, the central transformation team consults with member firms to understand their local processes and what they want from the technology.

Some multinational clients face challenges with complex VAT rules for international transfers. The VAT codes that need to be applied to invoices received or issued is an immensely complicated field in which expertise is scarce. One of PwC’s first external uses of AI was to build an app to simplify this field for its clients.

The Solution

Advising clients on AI from a position of real-life experience

To solve its clients’ international VAT challenge, PwC built a tool that uses AI Foundation. This is a set of AI technologies (such as the generative AI hub feature, Joule Studio, and the SAP Document AI solution) that connects to business data to allow organizations to develop, run, and manage their own custom AI agents and advanced AI solutions at scale—all through a single, unified entry point. Joule Studio supports this capability by enabling teams to create, deploy, monitor, and manage custom agents and skills for Joule with drag-and-drop simplicity.

Ten years ago, PwC was an early adopter of SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition from which it derived first-mover advantage. Now it’s an early adopter of Joule embedded in SAP S/4HANA and is already benefiting from its ability to optimize core business processes.

At the beginning of its AI journey, some people in the firm were skeptical. So the firm ramped up training on AI to allay any reservations and it now advises its clients to do the same.

The Result

Transformative efficiency improvements for both PwC and its clients

The international VAT tool developed with AI Foundation delivered great results to PwC’s clients. It enabled one pharmaceutical company to handle the VAT on international transfers 60% more efficiently.

The tool also had advantages for PwC’s own people. Rather than it taking an accountant a minute or two to look at every invoice, the AI in SAP S/4HANA can now do it automatically and much faster. This reduction in administrative work leaves finance professionals free to focus on complicated cases.

In the past, if PwC executives wanted any non-standard information, a service request had to be sent to the back office and it took several days to get a result. Now with Joule, executives are just one click away from finding what they want to know. They can get information themselves in seconds rather than days and talk to Joule in normal language like it’s another member of the team.

Efficiency improvements in consulting and application development

Looking to the future, PwC wants to make all its know-how available to the AI model on a global basis in a secure and responsible manner. The firm undertakes a huge number of client projects and accumulates a vast amount of practical experience every day. It intends to train the AI model on this data in a controlled environment, so that the SAP Joule for Consultants solution can harvest it and make it available to PwC consultants to use to solve clients’ problems.

PwC also intends to use AI to improve the efficiency of application development. The firm envisions a future in which developers won’t need to write code laboriously themselves—the SAP Joule for Developers add-on to SAP Build will do it for them. This will free up developers’ time to focus on important questions that really need human creativity to solve them.

“It’s amazing what’s already happened in the last couple of years,” Henneberger concludes. “We’re already looking forward to how Joule will develop over the next few years.”