Dive Brief:
- Big Four accounting and consulting firm Deloitte is looking to beef up how it advises clients in areas such as corporate risk through an alliance with San Francisco, California-based Pramata, a provider of contract management and data analytics services, the companies announced Tuesday.
- The alliance will allow the organizations’ mutual clients to leverage Pramata’s generative artificial intelligence-powered platform as well as Deloitte’s risk, regulatory, and forensic advisory services to “increase visibility into contract data and hierarchies that can span multiple systems and business units,” according to a press release.
- “Contract data is often an overlooked source of extremely valuable information and contract management is critical to an organization’s health,” Jessica Anderson, Deloitte’s transactions and business analytics principal, said in the release.
Dive Insight:
Global consulting firms have been increasing their use of AI to boost internal capabilities while also enhancing the services they provide to enterprise clients.
In August, Deloitte competitor KPMG announced a minority equity investment in Rhino.AI, whose AI-enabled platform is designed to help clients save time and money when upgrading legacy information technology systems. The financial terms of that deal weren’t disclosed.
In another example, Ernst & Young last year launched an AI adoption platform called EY.ai, which involved a $1.4 billion investment.
Pramata uses generative AI to “solve business-critical challenges like stopping revenue loss, reducing vendor costs, accelerating the contract lifecycle and ensuring compliance,” according to a description of the company’s platform included in the Tuesday release.
Founded nearly two decades ago, the company has long incorporated AI technology into its software, according to CEO Praful Saklani.
Now, with the emergence of generative AI in recent years, “there’s an ability to accelerate value and really up the ceiling on what people should expect from their contract management investments,” he said in an interview.
Saklani said the tech vendor enables customers to indicate what “trigger points” they’re looking for inside contracts to flag “something that’s really risky” or areas where there’s an opportunity to better negotiate deals.
He said the company also works hard to ensure that clients don’t see the kind of “hallucinations” or inaccurate results that are sometimes associated with generative AI technology.
The goal is to “use grounded enterprise data with GenAI so that they can get that enterprise-grade accuracy that’s required to actually make business decisions,” he said. “That is really the difference between GenAI being cool versus GenAI being useful.”
The company’s laser focus on data quality is a key reason why it was selected to become a Deloitte partner, according to Anderson.
“If you don’t build these AI tools with a sound foundation, you get garbage in, garbage out,” she said in an interview.
