Transcript

Rapid Response: Re-skill for AI, w/PwC’s Tim Ryan

The very best founders I know are brilliant at building systems. They connect teams, they remove bottlenecks, and they eliminate single points of failure. And yet When it comes to their own wealth. Most are running a disconnected stack. A tax accountant here and a state attorney there, a wealth manager who doesn't talk to either one of them.

Creative planning was built to fix exactly that. One integrated team of tax professionals, state planners, investment specialists, all coordinated by a dedicated wealth manager who sees your full financial picture and keeps every piece working together. Proactive tax efficiency, state strategy, investments all under one roof. Creative planning where wealth works together. Learn more at creative planning dot com slash masters of scale.

Global hiring is such a headache when you're building fast, but companies like Eleven Labs are scaling effortlessly with deal. They quadrupled their workforce in twenty twenty five. Without hiring an HR team. Build your global team with deal. Visit deal.com slash MOS and start expanding your business today. That's D E L

dot com. Slash M O S. Hey, folks, Jeff Berman here. I am thrilled to share some of the new names who will be joining us at this year's Masters of Scale summit. This may be our biggest stage yet. Reed Hastings, Meredith Whitaker, Van Jones, Amjad Masad, and more.

Will be there with us October 20th through 22nd in San Francisco. If you're building something great, or you want to build something great, We want you there with us too. Join us at masters of scale dot com slash apply twenty six. That's mastersofscot com slash apply. Twenty six.

Just get in the game. Knowing this is gonna be a game that goes on for a long time. Don't rush. Build the foundation. This gets to responsible AI.

What data are you using? Is that data right? Are the models working? Do you have the right governance, the right access, and the right testing? And our advice is to our clients, knowing you're eventually gonna need to do this, do it up front so you have that foundation there. That's critical before you try to scale it. That's Tim Ryan, chair and senior partner of PWC. The global professional services network that recently announced a billion dollar investment in AI in part to retrain their sixty five thousand person workforce. I'm Bob Sapian. Форма ретирав Фаст Копани, фонов The Flux Grub, and host of Masters of Scale Rapid Response.

I spoke to Tim on this show last year after PWC launched a multi billion dollar employee engagement platform in the face of the great resignation. I wanted to talk with him again because with the new initiative to embrace AI. PWC is taking the next step in the journey to reskill its team. Few business leaders meet with as many CEOs across as many industries as Tim. And so I also wanted to hear from Tim about what those leaders are both preparing for and hesitant about.

When it comes to the AI revolution. Tim shares key lessons. About how to reinforce human skills when harnessing new technology And why past tech transitions like the adoption of cloud computing May show us where the AI puck is headed.

I'm Bob Safi, I'm here with Tim Ryan, chair and senior partner of. P W C U S Tim, thanks for joining us. Bob, it's great to be with you. Thanks for having me. So you were on the show about a year ago.

Talking about a big investment you'd announced in a new tech platform for your workforce. More recently. PWC committed to another investment. This one a billion dollar commitment to build and enhance AI capabilities. AI's become The buzzword

of the year fascination fear Hopes hype. How did this new investment Come to be at PWC what was The impetus, the idea behind it.

So I'm actually gonna go back. five years ago, our people were worried about their relevance as the world was getting more digital. And so we made a commitment to our people. And we launched a program that internally we call Your Tomorrow. We said we will not leave you behind unless you choose to be left behind. And we invested in teaching our people about bots, how to build automations. How to use visualization tools, how to use data. It was so successful, we shared it with the outside world. We call it the skills of society.

New world new skills. So now fast forward to the announcement you just referred to. What we saw very clearly is The next step in this journey. Is teaching our people AI. We're fortunate to have a deep relationship with Microsoft that we've had for many years. We've done collaboration with them over the past, like cyber and security and our tax business and many others. And with their relationship with Open AI, we said this is the time for us to really leverage our Microsoft relationship and the great partnership with them.

And we committed to put a billion dollars behind that. And that billion dollars really goes to a couple of key areas. One is developing solutions for our clients to do our part to help them stay relevant going forward. And the second part goes right back to what we started five years ago. So another step in the journey, something we're really excited about. For me when ChatGPT was first released late last year. It seemed like it was sort of a fun new thing.

I didn't realize what the Impact was gonna be Did it take you by surprise a little bit about How Quickly This new generative AI has sort of moved through and

What sort of turned for you about like Oh, now's the time we have to do this. Clearly we saw a tipping point end of twenty two, beginning at twenty three. And for us it was a question of How do you scale it? It go back to this leadership lesson of listen.

Listen to your people, listening to your clients. So for us, it was really listening to those two stakeholders. When your clients are bringing you up every meeting, when you're hearing from your people, when they're asking you the next step in our journey is how do they get involved, then you know it was time. So I had the privilege of going to the World Economic Forum. And you couldn't escape without talking about CHEP GPT Open AI and the like. So all those different data points told us this was the time to go bigger. Fortunately we weren't starting from ground zero, which gave us the confidence to lean into that Microsoft relationship. I've been hearing some confusion from CEOs. I I'm guessing you have too about exactly how to respond. Like there's this

Imperative to take action to lean in. But some uncertainty about What exactly that m. What are you hearing about that? There's no doubt the world in general is more challenging.

today than it was three years ago. If you think about just inflation, Russia, Ukraine. There's a number of challenges that our clients are dealing with. They're under pressure from their investors. to deliver better returns. Their customers want more and more from them. And one potential way to deal with some of these pressures is embracing the power of generative AI.

Part of the questions we're getting from clients is How do I scale it? Where do I start? How do I do it responsibly? How do I manage the risk? If my business is regulated, how do I manage that complicated risk? But without a doubt, this is the year We're seeing more or more use cases. We're seeing companies that were not involved. They're wading into the water at this point. Yeah, well'cause there's this

straddle that's going on between falling behind as a business or as an industry. And then the potential risks. Of moving too fast, of you know, getting over your skis in some ways. Without a doubt, there's this concern about falling behind.

But I think pragmatically Much of the world today is in effectively the same place. The reality is as people embrace and learn, there'll be things that work, things that don't work. Our advice to our clients is just get in the game. I think this is one where measured and consistent approach is gonna be better off. The reality is that with the number of resources out there, there'll be the opportunity to be fast followers. So the big part of advice we're giving to our clients is Get in the game, but knowing this is gonna be a game that goes on for a long time.

Don't rush. build the foundation. This gets to where we focus on Responsible AI. So what we we mean by responsible AI is What's your foundation?

What's the controls that you have over there? What data are you using? Is that data right? Are the models working the way you anticipated those models are working? Do you have the right governance, the right access, and the right testing? And our advice is to our clients knowing you're eventually gonna need to do this. Do it up front so you have that foundation there. That's critical before you try to scale it. 'Cause ultimately you're gonna need to answer those questions. Do you have a sense yet whether it's a

There are certain functions that will shift to AI faster than others, or whether there are certain industries that might shift faster. Or is it Too early to know any of those things. I don't think it's too early, whether what I'm gonna say is turns out to be right or not is another thing, but the way we've looked at it

Is non regulated businesses in general will be earlier adopted. So think consumer and other areas, areas that are highly regulated, like financial services or healthcare, will be slower because of the risk of getting it wrong, right? So you'll see it in non regulated businesses. And then the biggest area first is Large skill Homogeneous frequently repeated activities in our business as an example. We have thousands of team across the country.

that pull information off of databases. We do like engagement letters, audit opinions. Those today are largely done manually. That is a perfect place to leverage AI. Now you'll still check it and validate it when it comes out, but those are great use cases for AI. You also have areas like call centers where companies are looking for ways to interact with customers. You have areas like insurance and claims processing, and how do you identify the magnitude of a claim? Data ingestion is another area. We worked with a global energy company where we used AI to do data ingestion as they went from one old system to another system. Those areas where it's large volumes, repeatable tasks are really good early day use cases where we see opportunities to leverage the power of generative AI. Mm. I mean I know PWC comes out of an auditing background and that auditing function is one that we've

Heard about Could be Automated. Is that happening the auditing? It's actually happening across all three elements of our business, auditing in our tax, in our consulting.

So we have platforms that our entire audit businesses run off of. We have artificial intelligence that's being built right into that platform if in a typical audit. you would test journal entries and at a large company that's multinational, it's impossible to test manually, it's impossible to test all journal entries. AI gives you the ability to test large populations, which gives investors more confidence in the numbers that they're using Same in our tax business, one of the big things we do in tax is we ingest massive amounts of data. off of our client systems to prepare their tax returns, do their analysis, assess compliance with laws and regulations, AI allows us to do that in a more efficient way and increasing the degree of confidence. And not that I don't need a person anymore? That the AI can just do it for me?

Yeah, so no Bob, we continue to believe that the world will need humans. The reality is most elements of most people's jobs. There's a mundane part. They are ripe for the use of gender AI.

And we see the ability to free up time to do more of the critical thinking, more of the analysis, more of the innovation, more of the softer skills that add value to not only how you feel as a person. but also to the customer. So our strategy is what we call human led and tech powered. When we come back We'll hear details about how Tim and his partners are executing on their bold billion dollar investment in AI. And what kinds of industries and companies are best positioned to surf the AI wave.

Stay tuned. When you've built substantial wealth through your business, it's often tied up in a single equity position. The upside is real, but so is the risk, and knowing when to act isn't always obvious. Creative planning works with business owners to build a strategy around concentrated equity. When to diversify, how to manage tax risk, and how to protect what you've spent years.

Building. Creative planning where wealth works together. Learn more at creative plating dot com slash masters of scale. The Wired Newsroom is known for award-winning reporting on how technology shapes our world. On Wire's Uncanny Valley, we take that curiosity even further.

Each week, journalists from Wired break down the biggest stories in tech while speaking directly with the people building, challenging, and reshaping the future. Is the AI boom sustainable? How do you protect your privacy in an age of constant surveillance? Uncanny Valley tackles the questions driving today's tech debates and lighting up your group chats. Listen to new episodes every Thursday.

Wherever you get your podcasts. Hey listeners, Bob here. If you listen to Rapid Response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show because every Friday we release a second Rapid Response exclusively in the Rapid Response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely for From Ford CEO to NASA's administrator to the lessons from The Devil Wears Prada. It takes about 10 seconds to find, just search rapid response wherever you listen to podcasts and hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode. I hope to see you there. We're back.

Before the break, we heard PWC's Tim Ryan talk about why his firm is spending a billion dollars on AI. And the advice he's giving other CEOs about how to address the new tech wave. Now Tim talks about the undeniable impact of big tech's magnificent seven. and why AI could spark broad economic growth. Plus

He shares lessons. About building expertise across a team. What kind of business culture enables success in a tech transformation? And how AI can unleash our own personal potential like never before. Part of this billion dollar investment is that you're gonna

Retrain and reskill the whole workforce. Sixty five thousand people. Starting Now so Do you know yet what that looks like? Yeah, so Bob, yes.

One of the things that we bet on five years ago is that if we teach our people the fish They will be best equipped to apply that knowledge. To help our client. Meaning there's no way You can sit in the center of an organization.

And figure out every use case. And now this next journey is Every person in our firm We'll go through the basics of AI. We'll teach generative AI to everybody. What are the risks? What are the benefits?

What are some sample use cases? We will have gamification. We will have rewards. We will have short videos that are fun to help them learn it. What we launched last year as part of our new people strategy is a cutting edge learning platform where every person in the firm can customize their learning journey. What's now available is deep AI learnings for those who want to go deeper beyond the baseline. And then we already have

Thousands of deep technologists. And then we will also invest in them to take it to the next level. I'm not a software engineer or a technologist, and so While I'm intrigued by these new AI developments, I find myself sometimes struggling with how to become more expert in them myself.

I'm curious. What you have done to better acquaint yourself with what these new tools can deliver. Is there a personal retraining that's different? When you're an executive, or do you have to get in the trenches in in the same kind of boot camp as everyone else?

So I mentioned we have thousands of technologies. I literally have received hundreds, a couple hundred. emails showing me here's the research that I did. Here's where I think the firm should be going next. Every single piece that I get I read and I study. It has stretched me beyond belief. By the way, some of them also point out the risks, and and it's not all one sided.

The second thing is One of the big reasons I've I'm on the road almost a hundred percent of the time is I'm out meeting with our clients and our teams, and I'm getting to see what we're doing. In supply chain, in healthcare, in banking, and I'm getting to see those use cases. I sit on a few outside boards and I I get the ability to see experts come in and talk to us. And then of course I'm experimenting, right? I'm experimenting as an individual. We know it will be a straight line. We know it's gonna require more investment. But we certainly know that it is something in order to lead we need to continue to move forward on.

Investors are certainly rewarding The big tech players. The magnificent seven, as they're being called now, right? Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Facebook, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Tesla. It makes it Feel like Competition is narrowing.

I know you've said that you feel like AI increases competitiveness. Can you explain how those two things work together? Yeah, I do. I think there's clearly some companies that innovative technology They're being rewarded because they're creating the opportunity for all of us. to innovate. But then you've got the rest of us who aren't necessarily innovating the technology.

I think the playing field is is leveled at this point. Like whoever embraces it, whoever can scale it, and that's why I I love this podcast, this all comes back to management. high quality management teams will win. It's not the best technology we'll win. high quality management teams will win. Those managing teams that embrace change.

that bring their people along. that know how to implement technology, that know how to make sure you're getting the right return, the right outcome, to do it responsibly. All management teams aren't created equal. The ones who partner with those seven organizations and not recreate the will, but leverage what they've done. They'll be the ones who are rewarded over time. Mm-hmm. How much do you worry about?

A shift in the competitive landscape. For your firm. I mean, I've seen McKinsey's put out reports, Accenture's talking about reskilling they're doing. Like, how do you gauge Where you guys are relative to your own competitive set. We have really good competitors. Like we operate in a highly competitive industry. But I I think it's remiss to compete purely on technology. It is all about people in technology. And if we're gonna help a financial institution transform, if we're gonna help a retail organization look at new ways of engaging with their customers, leveraging generated AI.

It is about how do you bring stores along, how do you bring distribution sites along, how do you bring the supply chain along, and all that gets down to people understanding in industry. Which is something we're very good at. It's a bit of a juxtaposition that at a time where we are embracing A technology that Is more human like and takes on more human tasks.

That you are saying what will differentiate you Is The human side of your business, not necessarily the technology side. Yeah, Bob. If I go back right now. I would tell you fifty percent.

Of our clients. Have failed efforts that going to the cloud, implementing new ERP, implementing new platforms. History is both humbling and an important teacher. I've never met a client who have said I would have succeeded if I only chose technology A over technology B, provider A over provider B. I've never met one. What I've all met is

Had I invested more of my people. of how we're gonna run that bank branch differently, how we're gonna run our risk management function differently. That's the area when you look back of When companies succeed or fail. It is all about the people. The AI is massively exciting.

But ten years ago, fifteen years ago, it was the cloud. And some have succeeded on the cloud and others have found ROI revenue growth efficiencies elusive. And the difference between those who have succeeded, those haven't, is about the quality management, how they brought people along. And taught them new ways of working. Think about it. The average life of a Fortune one thousand company

twenty years ago it was thirty four years. Now it's seventeen. It's almost cut in half. But the ones who are succeeding are the ones who are evolving their workforce, the people who interface with customers. So we passionately believe it's about people armed. With the best technology. But we're not gonna have uh People less organizations, people less companies. You're not worried that they're gonna be fewer jobs or less needs for human

You're shaking your head. No. I'm not I'm not Bob because I see growth. The productivity and the efficiencies. That Generative AI brings Will drive more growth. And with that growth, people will be put to work. When you look at some of the big macros that are happening, we're seeing more investment in fintech, more investment in clean tech, more investment in climate. So when I look at the big picture, I do see meanual tasks going away. I do see massive productivity.

And that's why I'm very bullish on jobs at this point in time. And if you have uh fears or concerns about where AI might lead us. Where do those sit? I worry that AI people run to the presumption that it'll dehumanize us. I do worry about irresponsible use of AI.

But most importantly, Bob. I worry that people don't get on board for their own sake. For their own sake. Like I want an environment where people can achieve their full potential. In order to do that, if they're not proficient in the tools, and I think a big part of my job and many other leaders is to create that environment where people can achieve their full potential. And if we give them the right tools, the right environment.

They will do amazing things. Tim, this is this has been great. Yeah, Bob, thank you very much for having me. And thank you to your listeners as well. Listening to Tim, it's a reminder for me To keep exploring AI's evolving use cases in my own day to day work.

For someone like me who isn't engineering minded. Studying AI can feel intimidating. But no matter your experience or your age, now's an ideal moment for growth. To be willing and open to try new things. To become familiar with even the things that scare us. That's how we build wisdom in times of rapid change.

I'm Bob Safian. Thanks for listening. Humans will never be more intelligent than AI. There's gonna be two types of companies. Those are great at AI and those that went out of business because they weren't. How do we build a future?

That is human centered. I'm Rana El Calyubi. And on my podcast Pioneers of AI, we answer that question and so many more. As an AI scientist, entrepreneur, and investor, I know what it takes to build AI that works for everyone. Every week I sit down with the pioneers shaping our future.

and we take you behind the scenes of the AI that's transforming our lives. Find pioneers of AI wherever you tune in. Hey there, it's Jill Slessen. I'm launching a new show. It's called Money Moves, and your money is going to move. We're gonna help you make better financial decisions. We're gonna call out the BS you're finding all over social media. We're gonna give you actionable guidance to make your financial life clearer, less stressful. We're gonna answer your financial questions and take the mystery out of your financial life.

Follow and listen to Money Moves with Jill Schlesinger wherever you get your podcast. Masters of Scale Rapid Response is a Wait What original. I'm Bob Safian, your host and masters of scales editor at large. Our executive producers are June Cohen, Darren Triff. And Chris McLeod.

Our chief content officer and interim president is Lori Hoffman. Our producers are Chris Gautier, Masha Mactanina, Adam Skuse. Alex Morris and Tucker Legers. Our music director is Ryan Holliday. Original music by Eduardo Rivera, Ryan Holiday, and Daniel Nissenbaum.

Sound design and audio editing by Liam Jenkins and Tim Lu Lee. Mixing and Mastering by Aaron Bastanelli. Special thanks to Aria Finger, Saida Sapieva, Jodine Dorsey. Alfonso Bravo Colin Howard Tim Cronin.

Kelsey Capitano. Sammy Aputa. Anna Pizzino. Sarah Tarter. Luisa Velas.

Джастин Вінзлов Micke Williams Chinemea Zuana. Marielle Carricker and Katie Blazing. Visit mastersofscot com slash rapidresponse to find the transcript for this episode, and to subscribe to our email newsletter.

Become a member of Masters of Scale to get access to a year's worth of courses and content. on the masters of scale courses app Find out more at masterstofscale dot com slash membership.