PwC's Tech While You Trek: Fast Tracking Digital Finance Transformation

Tune into another episode of Tech While You Trek to hear PwC Principal Michelle Wilkes share how PwC has upskilled their entire workforce and built more than 6,500 automations to optimize their processes, and why they are now offering some of these automations to clients to help them in their digital transformation through the Digital on Demand marketplace. 

Transcript

Tech While You Trek:  Fast Tracking Digital Finance Transformation 

Guest:  Michelle Wilkes

Release Date:  February 8, 2021

Adam (00:08): 

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of PwC's Tech While You Trek. I am your host, Adam. And today I have with me, Michelle Wilkes, to talk about PwC's digital transformation and how we're bringing what we learned straight to our clients. So welcome, Michelle, please tell us a little bit about yourself.

Michelle Wilkes (00:25):

Thank you. I'm very excited to be on today. I'm a principal in PwC Labs, and what PwC labs is, it's our corporate technology innovation group, and we're focused on building intelligent automation services and products that we deliver to PwC, as well as directly to our clients to help them with their digital transformation journeys.

Adam (00:47):

For the last four years, PwC has been on a dynamic digital transformation journey. During which, we went all in on up-skilling our people and implementing new technologies. So what do you think clients appreciate hearing from us about?

Michelle Wilkes (01:01):

Well, first I think we're really appreciative that we did that. In these turbulent times, it really has future-proofed our ability to assist our clients as we've gone from being in-person to remote, and the digital transformations that we made and the automations that we've built have allowed us to really continue to serve our clients to the best of our abilities. And really, what I think our clients are super appreciative about hearing is what we've learned along the process. Digital transformation is happening in every corner of every part of every organization and it's been challenging. Our clients are really seeing some of those pitfalls and to the most part, what we hear is that it's been a bit of a failed promise, and our ability to showcase what we learned and how we did it, it gives them the opportunity to really take advantage and leapfrog their own digital transformation journeys to really think about how they're going to do it differently, and take advantage of the investments that they're making.

Adam (02:03):

So what have you seen other successful companies do when digitally transforming? Is it a mindset? Is it an approach? Is it something in between?

Michelle Wilkes (02:10):

It is all the above. I think what we've learned, that is you can't just take one leg of the stool, it's people, it's process, it's technology and it's then making an investment across all of them. So you can't really buy your way out of this with just a single technology, because at the end of the day, it's the people and the processes that need to be automated. And we looked at the processes and we said, "Should we be doing it this way or should we think about re-engineering them?" We made the investment that this wasn't going to be done from the center, but this was going to be a citizen journey, and we up-skilled all of our employees so they were on the journey with us, and then we made a big investment in technology. And we said that we were going to make sure all of our folks understood how these technologies would work and give them the opportunity to learn, try, sometimes fail, but then at the end of the day, really think about how they re-imagined the possible and delivered our services in a different way.

Adam (03:12):

So Michelle, you've been involved with PwC Labs and are leading PwCs commercialization of those automations created by the firm into the direct market, through our digital on-demand products. I was wondering if you could explain what exactly it is that we're packaging up for our clients?

Michelle Wilkes (03:28):

I think we learned a lot and one of the things that not only did we learn, but we produced, is we produced over 6,500 different automations, be they robotics, AI models or workflows. And as we talk to our clients on a daily basis, we know that they're facing the same challenges that we did and that we had the opportunity to really package our prebuilt automations and offer them to our clients to be able to use in their own environments.

Adam (03:58):

So first of all, that's insane, but how does PwC get to numbers like that?

Michelle Wilkes (04:02):

Well, it gets that way by making sure all of our employees are actively using the tools that we provided them. The data that we have today is that well over 65% of our workforce are actively using data analysis, data visualization, robotics, different types of intelligent automation tools. So at the end of the day, not only are we talking the talk, but we're walking the walk, and those are the types of results you get.

Adam (04:30):

So what are some of the biggest struggles for our clients right now when it comes to automation and what are our customers trying to solve for?

Michelle Wilkes (04:38):

If you've done everything the way you've done it before, you've optimized. You optimize your process, so what you did yesterday, you're going to do tomorrow. And sometimes it's hard to reimagine how you could do it differently. And so identifying what are all the use cases and how would you prioritize those use cases? I think our clients a little bit struggled on gathering all those use cases and figuring out what to automate and then how to automate it.

 So one of the benefits of digital on demand is it almost becomes a library of the highest priority of use cases. So it gives you a little bit of a roadmap of where to start. Now, let me give you an example. So you're going to be doing an accounts receivable, and today you look at your accounts receivables and you get your invoices in, and you look at pieces of data that you need to collect and then reconcile back to a contract. We have an AI model that allows you to upload your documents, we use our AI model to extract the information that you need and put it into an Excel sheet, and be able to do an automatic reconciliation. Now, what would have taken potentially weeks, depending on how many invoices you had, can be reduced to a matter of hours.

Adam (05:51):

What kind of data are you starting to see, are you starting to collect that supports customers going through these digital transformations?

Michelle Wilkes (05:58):

Digital transformation continues to be a really hot topic.  And we survey many of our clients and many of our CFOs, and 75% of them have committed to investing more resources into digital transformation throughout 2021 and probably into 2022. At the end of the day, they are all interested in being able to drive top line growth at a lower cost basis. And they want to reduce the amount of those manual hours, really save time, reduce errors, and use technology to really drive insights in order to put themselves in a better competitive position.

Adam (06:39):

So embarking on organization-wide transformation can sound intimidating. How does an individual team member really take ownership of something that sounds so big? And how can they see the value of that transformation?

Michelle Wilkes (06:53):

So I think that it starts with the idea of that citizen. It's about every team member working in concert together, and so I think sometimes when you think about organizational transformation, that becomes jargon. How do you turn that into something that is your day-to-day? And it's really about saying, "I'm going to think about it differently, I'm going to ask myself, 'could I do this differently? How could I do it? What would it look like if I did it differently?'" And that's hard, right? So we're not going to suggest that this doesn't come without some effort, but I think that if you push some of the responsibility down to the citizens or to the employees, I think that you'd be surprised at what could come up. So as opposed to it being just a top down effort or a top down initiative, it's really asking and driving innovation from asking everyone who's actually doing a daily process, "How would you think about doing it differently?"

Adam (08:00):

So Michelle, before I let you go, I want to ask you one kind of fun question. What do you say?

Michelle Wilkes (08:04):

Sure. I'll take it.

Adam (08:05):

What would the you of 20 years ago be the most impressed, surprised, taken aback by that the you of today uses from a technological standpoint?

Michelle Wilkes (08:16):

I've been in this space of technology and innovation for close to 30 years, and the thing that surprises me all the time is that much of the technology that we're working with today has been around for so long. So some of the AI, the natural language processing technologies, were part of a startup I did in the mid nineties. And what's really interesting is that it takes a long time for technology to be democratized and to really be woven in to the processes and the fabric of what we do. And I think that's something to be said in one of the questions that you asked me, which was, is it a technology? Is it a mindset? Is it a culture? What I've learned is that it has to be part of the mindset, it has to be part of the culture, and not just a technology, that these things take time. And we have to give our people the tools to be able to understand what the technology will do for them and then how to use it. So the thing that surprises me most is that we're not even further along

Adam (9:24):

Well, listen, Michelle, thank you so much for taking the time and stopping by today.

Michelle Wilkes (9:27):

Thank you.

Adam (09:29):

This has been another episode of Tech While You Trek. I have been your host, Adam. We will talk to you again next time.

Speaker 4 (09:38):

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