INTHEBLACK October/November 2024 - Magazine - Page 40
F E AT U R E
“We are very focused on ensuring that there is the right AI governance system in place for
wherever we are working with AI internally, but also within our client environments as well.”
JASON FOGATY, KPMG AUSTRALIA
HUMANS AT THE HELM
At KPMG, KymChat is viewed as an
assistant governed by humans.
“The human is at the helm,” says Jason
Fogaty, partner, KPMG Connected Technology
Group at KPMG Australia, adding that data is
“absolutely vital to AI solutions”.
“I think many organisations are having to work
through data quality, but there’s been very large
investments in data transformation programs
over the past decade, which has certainly laid a
strong foundation for a lot of clients.
“Of course, there is still work to be done,
and you still need to ensure you have the
right controls, data readiness assessment and
trusted AI impact assessment.”
Fogaty notes that content from KymChat
is clearly flagged as AI generated and that it
is for a human to review.
“Our employees are also trained in how
to review and test what is generated from
KymChat.”
Spark New Zealand, the country’s largest
telecommunications and digital services
company, is also rolling out customised
LLMs across its business, and upskilling is
an important consideration.
“There is an acceptance that more
upskilling is required,” says Anshuman
Banerjee, tribe and chapter area lead at Spark
New Zealand.
“We have just launched our internal
skilling hub called Te Awe. It was created
in response to the surge in demand for skills
in new technologies such as AI, data and
analytics, and cloud, to ensure that Spark
is equipping our people with new skills in
high-demand areas, while at the same time
ensuring that as an organisation, we are
building the future critical skills we need
in a sustainable and inclusive way.
“We also have our own testing teams,
which are creating some of the guardrails,”
Banerjee adds.
“The learning that is happening is not
just for the data teams or the AI teams, but
for the ecosystem of people surrounding
the technology.”
40 INTHEBLACK October/November 2024
HOW KYMCHAT BOOSTS PRODUCTIVITY
For KPMG, productivity and efficiency gains were
early wins from KymChat.
KPMG Australia’s Jason Fogaty says the
organisation had been experimenting with AI
technology for some time, but the arrival of
ChatGPT represented a “game changer”.
“We were one of the early adopters of Microsoft
Azure’s OpenAI Service, so that enabled us to get
our hands very quickly on OpenAI and to be able to
build KymChat,” he says.
There are now 10,000 users of KymChat at KPMG,
and its initial use case was to help them to find the
subject-matter experts within the organisation who
could help them in their roles or engagements.
“Then we moved on to our policies,” Fogaty says.
“Once we checked the data quality and the data
accuracy, they got loaded into KymChat and that
enables our staff to ask questions of policies, which
is really helpful as an experience, and also enables
them to get answers quickly.”
Fogaty says KPMG needed to ensure that KymChat
was highly secure, and that data did not leave the
private environment.
“We have our Trusted AI Approach, and we
prioritised use cases that we saw as low risk, so we
could ensure that our controls were robust and that
the new AI governance landscape we were building
was really humming and fit for purpose before we
looked to extend the rollout across the business.”
KPMG developed a Prompt Confidence Index,
which enables it to test the accuracy of what’s
coming out of KymChat, Fogaty adds.
“We now know that Kym is over 90 per cent
accurate all of the time.”