PwC wants employees to know automation isn't going to replace their jobs - and it's starting by using the tech to improve their work-life balance
- The increased use of automation across corporate America is spurring fears that the tech could lead to potential job losses in both blue-collar and white-collar jobs.
- But PricewaterhouseCoopers is leaning in to the tech trend and hoping it can improve work-life balance for its existing employees.
- The professional services giant recently committed to spending $3 billion to upskill its employees on tech like automation and AI.
- PwC urged employees to begin using the tech to find workers who could serve as internal evangelists for advanced tech. The company continually solicits feedback from those users to determine future investments.
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For some, the word "automation" can immediately elicit fears of job loss.
But PricewaterhouseCoopers is hoping that training employees on that and other technology can actually make them happier in their current positions - and ultimately help them stay at PwC.
Last year, the professional service giant committed to spending $3 billion to upskill its workers. The move comes as the industry rushes to try to overcome a shortage in tech talent by training its own employees on artificial intelligence, data management, and other in-demand roles.
But apart from the competitive need to create a "future-proof" workforce, PwC is also banking on education allowing employees to do high-quality work at a faster pace, ultimately improving work-life balance, said emerging-technology lead Scott Likens.
"We have to use the tools in a way that fundamentally provide more value to our clients, but [also] that really fundamentally change the way our staff work day to day," he told Business Insider. "Eventually there'll be a faster, more efficient way [to work], which helps everybody."
One way the company is training its workers is through AI Labs, a program that educates enrollees on basic automation and visualization tools, as well as how AI can be layered over those applications. For example, one platform used by PwC analyzes text to determine sentiment.
"It's unimaginable how fast some of these things have taken off because we've really listened to our customer, which is the staff, who are working with our eventual customer, which is our clients," Likens said.
To help ease fears around the tech, PwC is also using applications like virtual reality to train employees on topics like diversity and inclusion, even putting managers that have to fire someone in simulations to try to make the often difficult task easier.
'We didn't restrict it, we didn't force it, we didn't mandate it'
To figure out where PwC should make tech investments, the company went to its 55,000 US employees and urged them to begin playing around with different AI, automation, and data visualization tools.
Employees could nominate themselves to join a digital accelerator program aimed at training those individuals that could serve as innovation leaders within the firm.
"We opened it up. We didn't restrict it, we didn't force it, we didn't mandate it," Likens said. "It has to stick long term, so we can't force it from the center."
Convincing employees to begin using tools that could be viewed as eliminating parts of their job is difficult. Other firms, like Deloitte, have also taken the approach of finding tech "evangelists" within the ranks to help push adoption.
Likens' team at PwC got monthly feedback from employees to help shape future investments - a pace he described as dynamic for a professional services organization. "For a firm like ours that's hard. A partnership is hard to move. And in one year we've made more changes than I could have ever imagined," said Likens, who has been at PwC for a decade.
As employees got more comfortable with the technology, Likens exposed them to more advanced AI platforms that his team developed - assuaging concerns that workers would need to be experts in coding language like Python to be able to begin using the applications.
This provided feedback in a way that didn't expose the firm to much risk. Within a year, PwC says that 95% of all US employees were using new digital tools in their everyday jobs. Firm partners have also created more than 1,500 bots and AI models.
That knowledge, is now changing how employees interact with clients - and even convincing some to adopt more modern technologies, Likens said. He advises those who want to get started on a similar path to not think about the cost involved, and instead the value-add from using tools like automation.
It's a "little disappointing to me that people are a little hesitant, because it's hard and you have to make investments, but there's good value in that," Likens said. "Start with some of the basic stuff and take cost out of the system."