Ernst & Young is expanding its use of artificial intelligence to make the tax preparation process more efficient, while also recognizing its limitations.
"Everyone's very excited about AI and what it's going to do to our industry and to the progression of their career," said Belinda Pestana, EY Americas deputy vice chair of tax. "In every single aspect of our business, whether it's our back office, our front office, our delivery, what we're selling to clients, everything includes AI. With AI changing daily on the models that are available and alliances that are happening in the market, you have to be willing to engage in the changing environment to really keep up with it. As a firm we're definitely doing that."
Some firms have come under pressure to
EY has built a Global Tax Platform and other AI-powered technology. "Our clients appreciate that we build it once, and they don't have to continue to build things internally," said Pestana. "But there will be a time that comes when they start really putting more pressure on the pricing to receive some of the benefit from it. The conversations are definitely happening."
In a
"One of the early things that we did was trying to make sure that we got AI in the hands of all of our professionals," said Daren Campbell, EY Americas' tax technology and transformation leader. "The primary way that we did that was initially through a tool that we call the EYQ, which was based on OpenAI on Azure, but contained within the four walls of EY. We've also rolled out Microsoft Copilot to all of our professionals. The first level of that is really the digital assistant, making sure that we've equipped all of our people with some of those digital assistant tools. That has continued to expand over time. As Copilot has added the agent capabilities, that has been training our people on how to use some of the agent tools as well as rolling out some other agent environments that our tax professionals are able to use to enhance some of the processes that they're working on."
EY has also been embedding AI into many of its other tools and processes as part of its
Clients often choose to leverage AI from outside firms like EY. "When we talk to our clients about AI, most of our clients have said that they are not planning to build the AI themselves, because it's just moving too quickly," said Campbell. "To have access to some of the broader data and industry benchmarks and other things, they are looking to work with a third party co-sourced provider with the AI capabilities or leveraging software with embedded AI."
Keeping up with the latest AI models isn't easy, even at a firm as large as EY, where employees and partners may find themselves using various AI programs at home for their personal use. "There's definitely a realization that AI will be part of everyone's day to day, and I think a lot of our people have started personally, whether it's using ChatGPT or using Claude," said Pestana. "The other day I was using ChatGPT, and I thought I was the most up to date on what's going on, and my son said to me, "Mom, you're so last year. You should be using Claude.' Using it personally has allowed me to understand the capabilities that are available to me using it at work."
Partner candidates are asked about how they use AI personally, and that elicits helpful information. "In my workforce, every day I'm using it differently, and when I interviewed all our partner candidates for this year, I specifically asked each and every one of them, 'What exactly are you using AI for in your day to day?'" said Pestana. "I got so many use cases and so many examples that I built myself a to-do list of learning how to use the AI the way these candidates were using it themselves. It's really allowed me to save time. I built an agent that sorts through my emails and prioritizes the emails based on the vendors that I told them to prioritize. It sorts through and tells me that this is the news that you have from emails that you might not have responded to. It definitely saves a lot of time from going through data, reviewing data, and the reaction to that across the firm has been very positive."
Within her family, her sons have been drawn to the AI sector. "My son started in computer science because his two brothers were mathematicians in computer science," said Pestana. "They're both in the AI industry. They both have AI companies. He started, and then quickly realized this is not for me. So it was between finance and accounting, and of course I told him you should major in accounting. He said, 'Mom, accounting is so boring. I'm going to do finance. I want to be an investment banker.' Then he called me six months into his sophomore year: 'Mom, I just went to this event, and they had EY and Deloitte, and everybody there. The Personal Financial Services Group, that seems really interesting. Do you have that at EY?'
And I looked at him. I started in the Personal Financial Services Group, and he said, 'Well, mom, you didn't sell it enough.' So now he's a finance and accounting major. They're realizing the value.'"
