The big accounting companies use AI to replace or support human activities in tasks such as tax preparation, auditing, strategy consulting, and accountancy services. They mostly use NLP, robotic process automation, text mining, and machine learning.
However, they use different strategies as described by Zhou (2017):
• EY attempts to show quick, positive return on investment (ROI) on a small scale. The strategy concentrates on business value. EY uses AI, for example, to review legal documents related to leasing (e.g., to meet new government regulations).
• PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) favors small projects that can be completely functioning in four weeks. The objective is to demonstrate the value of AI to client companies. Once demonstrated to clients, the projects are refined. PwC demonstrates 70 to 80 such projects annually.
• Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited, commonly referred to as Deloitte, builds cases that guide AI-based projects for both clients and internal use. The objective is to facilitate innovation.
One successful area is the use of NLP for review of large contracts that may include hundreds of thousands of legal documents. The company reduced such review time from six months to less than a month, and it reduced the number of employees who had performed the review by more than 70 percent. Deloitte, like its competitors, is using AI to evaluate potential procurement synergies for merger and acquisition decisions. Such evaluation is a time-consuming task since it is necessary to check huge quantities of data (sometime millions of data lines). As a result, Deloitte can finish such evaluation in a week compared to the four to five months required earlier. Deloitte said that with AI, it is viewing data in ways never even contemplated before (Ovaska-Few, 2017). All big accounting companies use AI to assist in generating reports and to conduct many other routine, high-volume tasks. AI has produced highquality work, and its accuracy has become better and better with time.

Questions for case 2.4
1. What are the characteristics of the tasks for which AI is used?
2. Why do the big accounting firms use different implementation strategies?