A KPMG report on how AI is being used by businesses across the world exaggerated adoption of the technology with bogus case studies that appear to have been based on AI hallucinations. The October report, “Redefining excellence in the age of agentic AI”, made numerous false claims about the use of AI by organisations including the Swiss bank UBS, the UK’s National Health Service and the public transit groups Swiss Federal Railways and Transport for London. The inaccuracies were identified as AI hallucinations by the research group GPTZero and verified by the FT.
Big consultancies such as KPMG and EY are viewed as highly credible
Ahahahaha no. You hire them to create fancy-looking slides and reports that support decisions you already made. They will include a lot of weasel words and assumptions that aren’t true. Then, when shit hits the fan after management’s dumb idea flopped spectacularly, management can hide behind “but we even had big consultancy corpo confirm this is a good idea” while big consultancy corpo can say “assumptions we made were not upheld due to a changing environment blah blah…” and nobody has to take any responsibility. I always call it “decision-based evidence-making”.
Until they make a report with AI that results in a really expensive fine for the company they’re auditing, this will continue.
I can’t imagine hiring an accountancy firm that pushes their employees to use Gen AI.
