Beating up management consultants may have become something of an Australian sport these days, but they aren’t the only ones using AI at work.
Corporate Australia in particular is wildly excited about the introduction of this productivity charging technology. It is the new toy that everyone wants to play with before reading the instruction manual, and most fans realise there are plenty of wrinkles that need ironing out.
There is already plenty of evidence of companies adopting AI with an eye to eventually replacing workers doing more process-driven administrative jobs, but some, such as Commonwealth Bank, have learnt the hard way that there is a big gulf between what AI can do in theory and what it delivers in practice.
The adoption of generative AI, in which the model learns from existing data and can then spit out text videos and pictures when asked a question, is still in its infancy, so mistakes will be made.
In Deloitte’s case, using AI to help put the report together wasn’t the problem; instead, it was the firm’s laxity in getting the report checked by humans before it was stamped customer ready.
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Adding insult to the injury, Deloitte markets itself as a firm that can educate its corporate clients on how best to deploy AI.
Its glossy marketing material contains the boast that “deploying Artificial Intelligence and Generative AI across an enterprise requires the same level of operational strategy and action it takes to manage a manufacturing line or complex supply chain”.
In other words, even the experts in using AI appear vulnerable to tripping up.
There has also been criticism of Deloitte about transparency around its use of AI in the report. The new version reportedly includes an explicit concession in the methodology that generative AI was used for what the firm called “traceability and documentation gaps”.
“There have been media reports indicating concerns about citation accuracies which were contained in these reports. Deloitte conducted this independent assurance review and has confirmed some footnotes and references were incorrect,” the department says on its website.
It makes you wonder just how many worms are in the can being opened by AI. The Deloitte snafu certainly lifts the lid on a couple of big ones, and there will almost certainly be many more such mistakes in the future.
This isn’t an argument against AI, but there is a need for a codified set of checks and balances to be put in place, and it’s probably going to take more unfortunate bouts of hallucinations before we get there.
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