Deloitte is now looking to AI to help prevent mass layoffs in the future
By Irina Anghel
The giants of the consulting world are facing an unusual dilemma this year: Many of them are laying off hundreds of staffers even after hiring thousands of college graduates to meet new demand. Now one of the biggest of them all is looking to artificial intelligence to change that.
Deloitte LLP uses AI to evaluate the skills of existing employees and map out plans that move employees away from the quieter parts of the business and into roles that are in higher demand. It's part of a broader bet by the professional services firm that technology will allow it to moderate hiring growth over time.
The moves come after Deloitte added 130,000 employees this year. But in the midst of hiring, the company warned thousands of staffers in the US and Britain that their jobs were at risk of becoming redundant after the company was forced to restructure parts of the business in response to a slowdown in demand.
“Being able to avoid big swings in hiring and layoffs is clearly a great goal,” said Stevan Rolls, Global Chief Talent Officer at Deloitte. “You can always be more efficient and effective in finding the right people.”
Deloitte and competing professional services firms have already begun experimenting with using generative artificial intelligence to eliminate repetitive, time-consuming work long reserved for junior staffers, such as preparing documents for internal meetings or collecting large amounts of data for a customer pitch. Generative AI, popularized by ChatGPT, can produce sentences or essays in response to simple questions and compose these answers after being trained on a range of existing material.
With the latest projects, however, they hope the technology can help them better manage the thousands of employees they add every year.
Deloitte's total workforce is now approaching 460,000 following the hiring spree earlier this year. That's three times the number of new hires compared to a decade ago, when revenue was roughly half of what it is today.
“Let's imagine if Deloitte was that successful and we doubled our size again, I'd be really concerned about hiring a quarter of a million people a year,” Rolls said. “It may not be fewer, but it could be as many as what we assume now.”
First print: December 17, 2023 | 2:46 PM IST