Deloitte seeks to utilize Artificial Intelligence to prevent future mass layoffs

This year, the consulting industry leaders are facing a unique dilemma. Despite hiring numerous college graduates to meet the increasing demand, many of these companies are now letting go of hundreds of employees. However, one of the largest consulting firms, Deloitte LLP, is turning to artificial intelligence (AI) to address this issue. Deloitte is utilizing AI to assess the skills of its current employees and create plans to transition them from less busy areas of the business to roles that are in higher demand. This move is part of Deloitte’s broader strategy to use technology to control future hiring expansion.

The changes come after Deloitte added 130,000 employees this year. But amid the hiring spree, the company warned thousands of workers in the US and UK that their jobs were at risk after it was forced to restructure certain business areas in response to slowing demand.

“It’s obviously a great goal to be able to avoid big pay changes and layoffs,” said Stevan Rolls, Deloitte’s global executive director. “You can always be more efficient and effective in finding the right people.”

Deloitte and rival professional services firms have already begun experimenting with generative AI to eliminate repetitive, time-consuming work long reserved for junior employees, such as preparing documents for internal meetings or gathering data plots for client pitches. Generative AI, popularized by ChatGPT, can produce sentences or essays in response to simple questions and formulates these answers after being trained on existing material.

However, with their latest projects, they hope technology can help them better manage the thousands of employees they add each year.

Deloitte now has nearly 460,000 employees after hiring them earlier this year. That is three times the number of new employees compared to a decade ago, when turnover was about half of what it is now.

“Let’s imagine Deloitte was that successful and we doubled our size again, I’d be really worried about hiring a quarter of a million people a year,” Rolls said. “It might not be less, but it might be the same as what we’re paying now.”