“Understanding the possibilities and risks swiftly, making strategic choices in investment, and embracing the ripe market of affordable and powerful AI will lead to high success rates and unprecedented value."
Bart Van Rompaye, Head of Artificial Intelligence at KPMG in Belgium, explores the fascinating and sometimes scary world of artificial intelligence (AI) and explains how he helps organizations understand and leverage this new technology.
AI, and the seemingly infinite possibilities that are created, has exploded in the last two years. With AI technology evolving at an exponential pace and disrupting markets in unprecedented ways, why is it important for organizations to understand this new form of intelligence?
Bart Van Rompaye: Firstly, it’s important to point out that AI can be categorized into two groups: on the one hand, you have the powerful so-called Generative AI (GAI), such as ChatGPT, which has rapidly taken off in the last couple years. The other group consists mainly of more traditional AI systems, which support decision-making in ambiguous circumstances - for example: AI can help you estimate the value of your house - and which have not seen the same spectacular development.
The AI that’s getting all the media attention at the moment is the first kind, GAI. This technology can learn and adapt to new information and generate new content, like writing texts from scratch, or creating images out of thin air. This is where it gets tricky because GAI can mimic the human mind and has the ability to resemble “creativity”. But this also leads to grey areas and opens the door for countless opportunities to produce misleading or biased information.
Surely the technology isn’t so advanced that it can actually cause “real” harm?
Bart Van Rompaye: If used properly, AI has the potential to revolutionize fields such as healthcare by, for instance, tailoring or customizing medicine or care to patients and their symptoms. By reducing human error, patients would be diagnosed faster and more accurately, leading to earlier treatments and advancements in clinical research.
But, when AI fails, the repercussions can be huge and far-reaching. Take for example the (in)famous case of the oncology AI assistant that cost billions of dollars to develop and ended up being sold off for parts after misdiagnosing patients. Had it worked, the technology would have transformed healthcare as we know it. But by not having enough rigor in monitoring and controlling the risks, people were actually hurt. To generate a greater positive influence, AI needs to be trusted more, which opens the door for all kinds of risks. This is why KPMG often works with organizations to make those risks visible and controllable, because that is the only way to safely create a positive impact.
So, what is the potential of AI?
Bart Van Rompaye: New business models and economic models are constantly being created, making data and AI innovation the new normal. But many organizations are still struggling to figure out what AI does and how it can benefit their business. By now, I think everyone has understood that the potential of AI is huge but not everyone is ready to sit down and really think through what kind of an impact it can have on their organization, and how to actively make it a positive impact.
And what makes it even more challenging is the fact that AI is evolving at such lightning speed that regulators are having difficulty keeping up. What’s happening is that legislation is being developed in parallel as the topic and the technology grows. You can imagine that such a widely debated topic such as this is putting an immense amount of pressure on organizations to “get it right”, in circumstances where regulations and their practical translation are far from clear. Eventually, organizations that get it right will see unfathomable success and those that don’t will crash and burn - quite publicly as well!
It almost sounds like AI is a moving target.
Bart Van Rompaye: I agree that it sounds like it, but it doesn’t have to be. Once you understand the basics of GAI, advanced analytics, and machine learning, it’s relatively “simple” to leverage the technology to maximize your return on investment. The hard part is figuring out what the possibilities and risks are and deciding quite quickly where and how fast to go. The market is ripe with affordable and powerful AI. With success rates quite high at the moment, and costs as low as they have ever been, the key lies in making the right choices in terms of investment of effort and budget.
So, how exactly can KPMG help?
Bart Van Rompaye: We start by very simply explaining what AI is and training organizations in using it. Next, it’s important to investigate an organization’s AI ambition and help them express their strategic objectives. Once we’ve performed a maturity and readiness assessment, we can start mapping out how we can help them achieve their goals.
We sometimes see organizations that think “Our team has very strong technical skills so, how difficult can it be to work with AI?” And that’s where they’re wrong. Moving forward purely on your technical skills won’t allow you to maximize the value of AI or to mitigate the risks the way you should. We have a group of data scientists that build and integrate AI solutions for organizations, but through the rich organization that KPMG is, we can offer companies so much more: identify a strategy – measure the impact on their sector, translate it into their ambitions, draw-up a roadmap with tangible targets and activities to pursue – identify valuable uses for AI, implement change management to ensure that the new solutions are being used effectively, and identify and manage risks.
Concretely, how is KPMG helping to make a difference?
Bart Van Rompaye: That’s just it! What makes us stand out is the fact that we have the expertise in-house to handle all those topics. We have the know-how and capabilities to enrich them further, link-up with sector experts including specialists across the other member firms, explore suitable technological solutions which we can embed within the bigger picture - including data management, respecting data privacy, understanding new legislation such as the AI Act, developing effective risk management frameworks, and AI governance. The list goes on. This means that we can fully unburden the client by managing a project from the beginning to the end and absorb any shift in scope that may happen.
We’ve noticed that leaders in AI often have no background in AI, and they struggle to break through the noise to get a clear view of what’s really going on, let alone being able to explain it to their people. And that’s where KPMG come in!
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