Business Insider published an article early this morning that blatantly suggests AI is a huge threat to the Big 4 revenue machine. Let’s include the intro here so you can see where they intended to go with it:
The Big Four — Deloitte, PwC, EY, and KPMG — are a select and powerful few. They dominate the professional services industry and have done so for decades.
But all empires fall eventually. Large corporations tend to merge, transform, or get replaced by the latest wave of innovative upstarts.
BI used two different headlines that we know of: “AI is coming for the Big Four too” and “It’s not just jobs on the line — AI threatens the Big Four’s dominance.”
For the article, BI spoke Alan Paton, noting that he was “until recently was a partner in PwC’s financial services division” and is now CEO of a Google Cloud consultancy called Qodea. And here’s what Alan had to say about AI hackin’ and whackin’ and smackin’ the Big 4 workforce:
Most structured, data-heavy tasks in audit, tax, and strategic advisory, Paton said, will be automated within the next three to five years, eliminating about 50% of roles. There are already examples of AI solutions capable of performing 90% of the audit process, he added.
Paton said automation could mean clients increasingly question why they should pay consultants big money to “give me an answer I can get instantaneously from a tool.”
Unless they become far more specialized, the Big Four will be in trouble, he said.
We’ll note here that Paton was at PwC for a little over a year according to LinkedIn. He spent eight years at Accenture and six years at Capgemini before that, with a two-year stop at Google prior to joining PwC. So this isn’t some 30-year lifer we’re talking about.
So, what do we think? Is this the beginning of the end for Big 4? Or just a guy waving an End is Nigh sign because that’s the cool thing to do these days?
