Deloitte, having hired about 130,000 staffers this year, is employing artificial intelligence to assess the skills of its existing workforce.
According to a report by Bloomberg, the company is leveraging AI to assess the productivity of its workforce. The goal is to strategically reassign employees from less active business sectors to roles currently experiencing higher demand. This innovative approach is part of Deloitte’s broader strategy to leverage technology and, in turn, manage the growth of its workforce more effectively over time.
This AI-driven initiative is a response to the current downsizing dilemma and a proactive step to manage the workforce efficiently that Deloitte adds each year. Deloitte has a workforce of around 460,000, triple the number from a decade ago.
The move comes on the heels of the company’s warning to thousands of employees in the US and UK that their positions might become redundant due to restructuring necessitated by a slowdown in demand in certain areas of the business.
“It is obviously a great objective to be able to avoid large swings of hirings and layoffs,” said Stevan Rolls, Global Chief Talent Officer at Deloitte. “You could always be more efficient and effective about finding the right people.”
The company has begun using generative AIs like ChatGPT to automate and eliminate repetitive tasks reserved for junior employees. These include document preparation for internal meetings or rummaging through data for client pitches.
With this latest initiative, Deloitte and its counterparts aim to utilise AI to streamline the management of their extensive workforces, given the challenges posed by repaid hiring and organisational restructuring.
While this move relieves the workers, it will also require them to learn additional skills and multitask.
“Let’s imagine Deloitte was so successful, and we doubled our size again, I’d be really worried about hiring a quarter of a million people a year,” said Rolls. “It might not be fewer, but it might be the same as we hire now.”
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