Executive leadership insights

Transform through generative AI

5 minute read

If you’re a senior executive, here are three facts about generative AI that you can count on.

It has caused AI to reach a tipping point. Generative AI (GenAI) is so powerful, so scalable and soon to be so pervasive, it’s poised to change how work gets done and how industries operate.
You’ll only find success with GenAI if it’s built on trusted foundations and generates trust.
It’s more important than ever to work across the C-suite to truly realize value from GenAI.

At PwC, we’re reinventing our business and workforce with the help of generative AI — and we’re instilling trust-by-design into our operations and those of our clients with our responsible AI toolkit. Based on our leadership in AI and our experience helping companies across all industries transform their businesses, here’s what every senior leader needs to consider. The goal is to use GenAI for greater productivity today and new business models tomorrow.

GenAI is poised to transform your company and industry. The technology is advancing quickly and its costs are dropping rapidly. The result is exponential growth in use cases for business and the potential for significant ROI. GenAI could soon make your knowledge workers 30% to 40% more productive and enable new business models.

To take the lead on this business-critical technology, make sure that your organization has a GenAI strategy that can deliver value and manage risks. Since so many of your employees may soon be using GenAI, a successful strategy should include responsible AI practices in every area of the organization. As you look to accelerate ROI, you may also consider including an “AI factory” to help scale GenAI across the business.

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As CFO, you have two big tasks with generative AI: to help maximize your organization’s return on investment (ROI) and to transform your own function. To support the organization, provide a plan that’s complete with mechanisms to track spend and ROI and that shows how and when generative AI investments can help deliver top-notch returns by transforming business processes and functions. ROI can often come quickly, thanks to generative AI’s remarkable ability to scale — a single “pattern” of deployment can often deliver value in multiple functions and lines of business.

Inside tax and finance, generative AI can automate many rote accounting, controls and compliance tasks and help your team make enhanced, faster decisions. It can, for instance, automate some financial reports and flag anomalies in others, summarize regulatory notices and competitor intelligence and provide financial insights at speed.

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Your top generative AI job as a CIO is to take advantage of how this technology can scale far more quickly — and deliver faster ROI — than conventional AI. You can achieve this most effectively with an AI factory, an operating model tailored for generative AI. That often may require identifying and closing technology gaps, whether in data sets and integration, APIs, cloud engineering skills or responsible AI practices to manage cyber and other risks.

Generative AI is quickly changing how software is developed, which will have major implications for both the applications you buy and develop in-house. Automation offered by GenAI can also help your team do more with existing resources. It can, for example, create test scripts and synthetic data to expedite deployment of technology tools and apps. Consider, too, how to provide the business with GenAI-generated analytics, to help support faster, more data-driven decisions.

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For the CISO, GenAI can be both a new arm in your defensive arsenal — and a new source of threats. To support your work, it can generate and analyze potential attack patterns, helping you identify vulnerabilities and respond more quickly to threats through Q&A guidance. It can also automate routine security processes, leaving your team more time to concentrate on novel or critical threats.

But threat actors can use GenAI as well, generating more compelling and sophisticated phishing and deepfakes. Malicious actors could potentially breach and manipulate your GenAI systems. Protecting against these threats will likely require both upskilling in GenAI-specific cyber hygiene and cyber defenses customized for your GenAI models, data and content.

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Compared to other legal industry technologies, GenAI can deliver ROI more quickly for the legal department. A single GenAI model may be able to augment several aspects of your document-related work: from contracts to legal research, document review to horizon scanning and more. With its user-friendly interface and its ability to make sense of unstructured data, GenAI can also enhance other legal tech tools and accelerate your tech ecosystem’s integration.

As chief legal officer, you can take the lead in managing GenAI’s potential legal and compliance risks for the organization. Your team may also be well-placed to lead in its implementation. GenAI works better when it receives “prompts” in precise, highly intentional language — something lawyers are trained to write.

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Generative AI can help CMOs do more with existing resources. It can, for example, rapidly develop first drafts of art and copy, automatically document internal processes and automate content classification and distribution — providing your team with more time for strategic marketing. Generative AI can also make it easier to query analytic data sources, which means faster access to actionable insights.

As CMO, you’re a steward of your organization’s brand. Work with other senior leaders to make sure that your company’s generative AI use follows responsible AI principles — including effective compliance, privacy and actions to minimize misinformation and bias.

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GenAI can (and likely will) change everything about operations — improving customer and employee experiences, boosting productivity, managing costs and risks and transforming the nature of work. It can help generate or evaluate documents throughout your organization (such as contracts), draft or troubleshoot software code and product designs, and help deliver faster, easier access to data and analytics.

To operationalize GenAI at scale, the place to start is governance and security. You’ll need to evaluate internal capabilities, including your unstructured data landscape. Work closely with your CIO to assess solutions — and determine how to take advantage of the GenAI functionality that’s being built into existing business applications and how to create your own AI factory for broader transformation. Consider too trust-by-design, making your GenAI responsible AI from day one.

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GenAI can deliver value to tax quickly — growing your capacity to support the business. A single, customized GenAI model can classify, summarize and analyze partnership agreements, controversy trends, due diligence reports, tax notices, tax returns and more. It can even support more recent responsibilities, such as Pillar Two global minimum tax disclosures by producing high-quality first drafts based on your specific instructions.

Help tax get a seat at the table early by identifying R&D credits to help pay for GenAI initiatives. Another place to start is by upskilling your team on GenAI to safeguard data, manage risks and continually enhance performance.

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CEOs, chief strategy officers and chief transformation officers have two big questions to answer. The first is, How can GenAI transform how we work? GenAI can turbocharge productivity by automating some tasks and providing insights through an “AI copilot” to augment others. The second question is, How can GenAI transform our business model? With GenAI’s help you might, for example, be able to offer every customer the hyper-personalized products and services that today only your highest-value customers receive. To navigate this fast-paced change, the place to start is usually a focus on the outcomes you’re after.

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