ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Artificial intelligence will shake up employment across all industries , especially in finance functions where menial , repetitive tasks may no longer be the domain of eager-to-impress graduates . We speak to Shamus Rae , Head of Innovation and Investments at KPMG
“ I ’ m a maverick lunatic so I ’ m probably the wrong person to ask if there ’ s going to be too much AI ,” laughs Shamus Rae , Partner and Head of Innovation and Investments at KPMG .
His stout belief and faith in artificial intelligence is unwavering , perhaps not surprising given he cycles 120 kilometres a week and owns a Tesla . Robotics , automation and humans are living side-by-side , and Rae ’ s job is to maximise these relationships through digitisation at KPMG , both internally and externally for clients .
A shake-up in the traditional formation of the workforce writ large is coming . A World Economic Forum report predicts that five million jobs will disappear in 15 countries by the end of 2020 , the Fourth Industrial Revolution driving a demand for creativity at the expense of office admin . Put bluntly , “ people need to embrace working with robots rather than people ,” KPMG ’ s UK Head of Culture Jayne Vaughan said late last year .
NO BRAINER ?
KPMG has been studying the consequence of new technologies on the finance function of business in particular .
And what better place to start than with KPMG itself . Rae describes how AI is impacting the organisation ’ s work in transactional accounting : “ If we do an audit on a bank , today what we would do is have a lot of staff working through their loan book doing some sampling and assessment . We only ever do sampling because you simply can ’ t go through a global bank ’ s loan book manually – it is
28 May 2017