Deloitte LLP turned to artificial intelligence to assess the abilities of current employees and create plans that would relocate them from less busy areas of the company to more in-demand ones.
The professional services company is betting that technology will enable it to gradually control the expansion of its hiring over time.
The actions follow Deloitte’s 130,000 employees hiring this year. Although the corporation was obliged to restructure some parts of the business in response to a downturn in demand, thousands of employees in the US and the UK were told by the company that they could lose their jobs amid those hirings.
“It is obviously a great objective to be able to avoid large swings of hirings and layoffs,” Stevan Rolls, global chief talent officer at Deloitte said.
“You could always be more efficient and effective about finding the right people.”
Generative artificial intelligence is already being tested by Deloitte and other rival professional services firms to replace time-consuming, repetitive tasks that were previously only performed by junior employees, like preparing documents for internal meetings or compiling vast amounts of data for a client pitch.
However, they’re hoping that with the newest projects, the technology would enable them to more effectively manage the thousands of new hires they bring on each year.
After the hiring frenzy earlier this year, Deloitte currently employs close to 460,000 people overall. When compared to ten years ago, when income was around half of what it is today, that represents a threefold increase in new employment.
