KPMG targets AI-aided workers

Tax and technology consultancy KPMG Philippines on Thursday said it is hiring more workers to maximize the benefits of artificial intelligence or AI to clients.

“The more technologies there are, the more we need to hire people just to be able to bring these technologies to clients and help them understand these technologies,” KPMG Philippines vice chairman and chief operating officer Noel Bonoan said at the firm’s Innovation Summit in Bonifacio Global City, Taguig.

Since 2015, he said that the company has expanded its technology consulting team from 10 people to about 600 people.

“We’re hiring more people with coding knowledge. That is what we need as a multidisciplinary business,” Bonoan said.

He added more foreigners are seeking Filipinos with knowledge and skills sets related to robotics.

Robotic automation

“In 2015, we implemented robotic process automation and now we do it for our foreign KPMG offices because they realized there’s a huge pool of talent in the Philippines,” Bonoan shared.

These were his replies when asked whether the use of AI will lead to huge job losses among accountants and other workers in the service industry.

“While AI can compute and generate some conclusions, there are many factors that are human. An example is whether that company should get into that business or not,” Bonoan said.

“AI can only give guidance or negations on where that direction is headed. Accountants have to make a lot of judgement calls and the experienced ones have that instinct that a certain scenario will change which AI cannot estimate,” he continued.

Upskilling Filipinos

Bonoan said KPMG continues to help design curricula of schools to prepare students for the work requirements and opportunities at the service-based company, which not only demands hard skills like engineering but also soft skills or interpersonal communication.

University of the Philippines-School of Business professor Erik Capistrano said more public-private partnerships are needed to establish a culture of relevant education in the country.

“We need a more active approach through partnerships as we now have the freedom to create content in curricula and probably demand the resources to be able to offer short courses,” he said.