PwC UK launches UK tax AI assistant tool

Professional services firm PwC has rolled out a new AI tool to assist its UK tax wing with its work for clients. The tool has been released in collaboration with strategic partners Harvey and OpenAI.

Laura Hinton, PwC’s Tax, Legal and Workforce leader,PwC UK, said, “Generative artificial intelligence is transformative and presents unprecedented possibilities for both our people and our clients. Working with Harvey and OpenAI, we will be able to offer the most sophisticated tax AI enabled services and model in the market and further differentiate what we do, driving growth for our business, our clients and our people.”

With GenAI captivating the tech world, audit and advisory firm PwC is currently working to boost its AI offering to clients. The Big Four advisory recently said it would put $1 billion toward scaling its own AI capabilities as well as helping its clients do the same over the next three years – including opening up access for Microsoft’s OpenAI Azure cloud platform and OpenAI’s GPT-4 and ChatGPT.

The latest efforts in this regard will see PwC’s UK wing work alongside alliance partners Harvey and OpenAI, to provide all 2,300 PwC UK tax professionals with a new AI assistant. Built on a foundation of PwC UK’s proprietary tax expertise with the underlying technology developed by Harvey and OpenAI, the tool will generate tax content as part of the delivery of services to clients. To do this, it combines tax and technology skills to create a unique AI asset that turns knowledge into outcomes for the consulting firm’s clients.

Harvey is a generative AI company backed by Sequoia and OpenAI's startup fund building the future of professional services. According to its co-founder and President Winston Weinberg, by leveraging the “cutting-edge technology of Harvey and OpenAI,” the resulting tool aiding PwC’s tax wing is “a prime example of how AI can augment human expertise and transform the way professional services are delivered."

OpenAI is a US artificial intelligence research laboratory, which has leveraged systems running on the world’s fifth most powerful supercomputer, to conduct research in the pursuit of developing user-friendly AI tools. Brad Lightcap, its COO, added that the new collaboration with PwC and Harvey would supercharge “the capabilities of knowledge workers and enhance the customer experience” in the years ahead.

Bivek Sharma, PwC UK’s chief technology officer, concluded, "We are already seeing exciting results from using the Tax AI model within our teams and we look forward to bringing the benefits of AI to our clients. Our partnership with Harvey and OpenAI has been instrumental - the combination of PwC UK’s market leading Tax expertise and Harvey’s AI engineering expertise has allowed us to create a truly unique and powerful Tax AI model.”