"Luxembourg needs to be on the offensive if it is to remain competitive. With serenity and due diligence on all fronts." Six months after the launch of PWC's GenAI Business Center in Luxembourg and a few days before the update of the national strategy on artificial intelligence by prime minister (CSV), PWC Luxembourg's technology partner and digital leader had time to compare his vision with reality.
“We were and are strongly convinced that GenAI will be a transformative factor that will last over time,” Witz stated. “Many studies say so, including our CEO Survey: all senior executives, both worldwide and in Luxembourg, agree that this will be a major transformation, primarily in terms of operational efficiency, but also in terms of the ability to generate new revenue streams", he said at a time when the Big Four consultancies - and other advisory firms like Accenture, for example - have invested billions of dollars in these technologies, most often to the benefit of Microsoft and OpenAI (which develops ChatGPT). “Obviously, as part of our responsibility to ensure Luxembourg's position in the European marketplace, it was essential to have support for this acceleration and a framework to enable industries and players to meet with us, but also with Microsoft, to raise awareness of the impact this can have. We need to find the right recipes for accessing generative artificial intelligence.”
In an economic environment that is often made up of small and medium-sized businesses, adopting this technology is no mean feat, due to a lack of available talent or financial resources, even though these technologies will have a major impact. "With these technologies also comes the myth that it's something easy to set up and use. But there are also regulatory aspects to integrate, risk aspects, and also knowing how to focus efforts to generate the impact that everyone wants", explained Witz, who puts forward a figure: 78% of the CEOs questioned in Luxembourg think that this will improve the quality of their products and services.
GenAI Business Centre
The Big Five have adopted strategies that appear to be fairly similar, but also differ, with some preferring to develop their own chatbot, others allowing their employees to use ChatGPT, and still others having created a virtual hub equipped with tools to try to steer SMEs towards the light. At global level, the Big Four have signed the largest contracts for ChatGPT Enterprise and identified 3,000 use cases. At PWC Luxembourg, the ground floor experience centre has also been transformed into the GenAI Business Centre.
"We've had over 150 participants since we started the sessions in April, by industry, the banking sector, asset managers, insurers, the public sector," said Gregory Weber, director of the experience centre at PWC. "The idea is for people to discover the subject. The level of maturity is very heterogeneous. We can show them use cases, demos, solutions that we have started to develop, and so on. At the same time, we have 'deep dive' sessions where people from the same company come together with business or operational challenges."
"That's really important," added Witz. "The immersions were based on two criteria: people in IT, CFOs, heads of business, COOs, all the lines in the companies that are potentially concerned, but who need to understand the applications; and sessions with several companies in the same immersion to encourage exchanges with us, with Microsoft, with our experts."
“Focus for impact”
"There is enormous interest, but at the same time there are still questions," Witz said. "Good questions. Few companies are saying that they don't want to implement generative AI. The questions are more along the lines of 'what are the prerequisites' and 'how fast are we going? You need data, company data and good quality data. This has rekindled the appetite for subjects that were in decline, such as data governance and data quality. There is a growing awareness that this is going to be revolutionary. The environments are also regulated, and from a governance, risk and compliance point of view, there are things that need to be put in place, in a responsible way".
But Witz insisted on another aspect: "The problem is to find the use cases that make sense, and how these use cases can be integrated into the way the company operates, into the IT ecosystem, but also into the organisational model. This is a real issue, and one of the obstacles we've been working hard on, the 'focus for impact'. You can ask anything of GenAI, but that's exactly where you risk losing yourself, losing value, and even posing new problems."
Read also
"We are also the first Copilot user in Luxembourg. That's a good example. It's easy to put Copilot in people's hands, but you have to explain to users that they're going to be able to derive value from it," added Thierry Kremser, advisory partner and deputy advisory and technology leader.
"We are convinced of one thing: this will not replace people, but reposition them. Who should do what? How can we help employees with their tasks? If we look back 20 years, how much data did a person process in the course of a working day? How many emails did they receive? How many emails did they have to look at? And today? There has been a twofold explosion in access to information and in the need for people to work with that information. It's a necessity if people are to continue working. We need to continue working on technologies that serve people, employees and businesses. The internet has not necessarily replaced [roles], it has created new products and new services, new ways of collaborating... GenAI is no different. We're imagining a number of things, but we're only at the beginning... Our approach is very function-oriented, i.e., how GenAI can help IT, human resources and accounting. It's fundamental to create these connections around functions."
Read the original French-language version of this article