The perfect fit: Unlocking new value with GenAI
KPMG is helping a global footwear leader expand its AI capabilities and develop powerful new applications
Client
Leading global footwear retailer
Industry
Consumer and retail
Primary Goal
Unlock new capabilities and value through GenAI development and deployment
Technology
AI platform leveraging GenAI LLMs, data integration, automation, and cloud tools
Our client, a leading global footwear retailer and innovator, was intrigued by the dynamic potential of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). But the company knew that chasing technology in the name of “innovation” was not a winning strategy. Delivering impactful change begins with your people, so the company asked KPMG to help it build and deploy a secure framework and environment for GenAI-enabled solutions that focused on technology development as well as business adoption and value creation. Here’s how KPMG helped the company empower its people, deploying several new GenAI-driven innovations for multiple teams.
KEY OUTCOMES
Making a measurable difference
- Deployed secure GenAI platform and user interface for more than 4,500 employees
- Launched over a dozen transformative GenAI solutions across business functions, with more in pipeline
- Cross-functional value being captured across front- and back-office teams
- Established methods for AI innovation, governance, and value realization
- Drove successful AI workforce engagement, including learning and development (L&D), communication, and adoption strategy
Client transformation journey
Click on each part of the journey to learn more about our client’s transformation.
A key consideration from the start was not to simply chase technology for the sake of technology. This is about being business led, and technology enabled. In other words, how can AI and modern tech enable and accelerate desired business outcomes? How can AI help the growth agenda, drive efficiency, and improve workforce and customer experience? What value can we capture for Sales, Marketing, Retail, Finance, or other functions? How do you empower your workforce? While our client aimed to drive innovation and unlock value for the business, they took pride in enterprise adoption and experience.
Martin Sokalski
Principal, Advisory, US Technology Leader for Consumer & Retail, KPMG US
How KPMG helped our client build a foundation for GenAI
KPMG began working with the company on a series of agile initiatives to expand its overall AI/GenAI awareness, establish a secure development framework, and test and launch initial proof-of-concept (POC) use cases for several different business functions. Our KPMG resources on this project have included teams from technology strategy and architecture, emerging technologies, AI centers of excellence (CoE), and enterprise innovation. This cross-functional group quickly provided the client with extensive on-the-ground AI and GenAI experience and capabilities. We also brought in subject matter specialists who cover more than a dozen different business functions to help nail down recommendations and leading practices for functional value capture.
The secure new AI platform went live for corporate staff and has already produced multiple value-creating business solutions. We continue to work closely with the company on platform operations, optimizations, and ongoing AI-enabled business transformation.
Here’s a closer look at three key foundational initiatives to date:
Expanding awareness and engagement
Our work kicked off with a KPMG Ignition session, a deep-dive innovation workshop that included:
- Participation by the client's senior leadership and staff from more than 10 business units
- Clear definitions and examples of both AI overall and GenAI specifically
- Demonstration of GenAI applications in action, including direct participation and presentations by third-party large language model (LLM) teams
- Detailed review of KPMG AI/GenAI experience: established frameworks, user adoption journeys, development methodologies and technology tools, business cases, security, governance, and other leading practices.
Building a secure foundation for AI/GenAI
Next, we worked with the client’s teams to establish an overall roadmap for adoption and scaling of the AI platform in a test environment. Key steps in this POC phase included:
- Establishing high-level AI/GenAI operating model
- Final selection of the GenAI text-to-text and text-to-image LLMs best suited for the company’s needs
- Discovery, review, and prioritization of potential POC use cases
- Defining security, governance, L&D, change management, and related requirements
- Setting up a steering committee and CoE composed of cross-functional teams
- Setting up a cloud-based test environment that leverages GenAI modeling tools and other services
- Selecting four initial pilot use cases for development, and then configuring the LLM prompts to optimize the GenAI model and outputs for each use case:
- Root cause analysis for customer service: Analyze thousands of calls, identify issues, and generate recommended responses and mitigations; beyond real-time alerts, this application actually provides customer service staff a preview of the most common issues awaiting them each day
- Contract summaries for legal: Tool to scan often lengthy and complex contracts and generate succinct summaries and potential issues for leadership
- Product description generator for marketing: Enables rapid generation and customization of product descriptions in multiple formats for more than 30,000 product SKUs
- Visual marketing idea generator for sales/marketing: Uses both text and image inputs to generate image outputs of potential product displays in stores across global locations.
Operationalizing and scaling
The custom AI platform was rolled out in a live production environment for the company’s more than 4,500 global corporate staff, and KPMG continues to work with the company to enhance and scale the platform. Key steps in this phase included:
- Firmly established enterprise-grade security and governance processes
- Moved LLMs and four initial POCs into production
- Built operational dashboard to monitor the metrics for the POCs
- Collected user feedback from POCs and defined next steps to optimize the related GenAI models
- Tested data integration and automation
- Piloted 12 additional use cases in the production environment to support e-commerce, finance, product, and sales functions
- Developed change management assets, L&D materials, and user guides for the AI platform.
The real measure of success
"People, process, and technology.” It’s a tried-and-true mantra to guide enterprise performance and innovation. But for our client, there’s a reason that “people” comes first. Empowering its people has always been core to the company’s culture and values. And it’s why user adoption and enablement is the top key performance indicator for the company on its AI and GenAI initiatives. For our client, success is about much more than simply identifying new cost savings or improving operational efficiencies. It’s about giving its people the tools they need to continuously expand their capabilities, drive innovation, accelerate growth, and thrive in the workplace.
Meet the team that is helping our client unlock new value through AI
Our teams have extensive experience with both AI and GenAI technologies. We’ve helped clients with a wide range of AI and GenAI initiatives, including overall AI strategy; jumpstarting the AI journey; trusted AI; empowering the workforce through L&D, change, adoption, and value capture; and technology deployment, support, and optimization. We’re here to guide you with an AI strategy that elevates your business, drives value, ignites growth, and sparks innovation. You can with AI.
Martin Sokalski
Principal, Advisory, Digital Strategy & Solutions Leader, KPMG U.S.
Peter Irwin
Principal, Advisory, Lighthouse, KPMG LLP
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