Deloitte launches gen AI incubator to serve global, Indian enterprises

Deloitte on Tuesday announced the launch of its global generative AI market incubator that will promote innovation in generative artificial intelligence (AI) and serve enterprises in India and across the globe. 

The AI incubator will leverage AI, machine learning (ML) and other emerging technology expertise of the company’s professionals, including data scientists, AI specialists and engineers. These professionals work through a multi-disciplinary model built on design thinking to ensure speed, faster time to market, and immediate value generation in critical projects and help Deloitte collaborate with its clients to integrate generative AI into their operations.

At present, Deloitte works in areas of drug discovery, customer experience, content generation, and personal avatars marking over 100 corporations in the past six months and generative AI has a big role to play in these segments. The launch of the incubator also aligns with the Indian government’s overall agenda of nurturing tech talent and AI-driven opportunities, the company said.

“Our focus is to harness generative AI's disruptive potential in partnership with our key alliances by leveraging our targeted industry solutions that help clients realize sustainable business outcomes and achieve real transformations,” Nitin Mittal, Global Consulting Emerging Markets Leader at Deloitte, told Tech Circle.

He added, “To catalyze the market we are partnering with premier academic institutions and industry bodies and rapidly scaling trained Generative AI talent pool across skills. This will propel and nurture local tech talent providing them with more and more opportunities to serve global clients from India on these fast-evolving technologies.”

For CIOs and CDOs especially, it presents a unique opportunity for them to guide the business navigate through emerging challenges in their transformation journey. "Through this initiative, we aim to resolve unique industry cases by providing the right strategy, drawing on the strengths of our collaboration with alliance partners,” Sathish Gopalaiah, President of Consulting at Deloitte India, said. 

Deloitte has already collaborated with technology companies like Nvidia, Google, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, and OpenAI to leverage their large language models. The company also officially launched Gen AI practice in June this year and has already embarked on exploring various use cases in India helping them leverage chatbots, develop image generation tools and prompt-based visualization tools for improved decision-making, and generate catalog-based products to enhance customer experiences.

To be sure, other consulting firms have also made big AI moves in recent months. In April this year, consulting major PwC said that it would invest $1 billion to expand its generative AI capabilities over the next three years, while EY announced in 2021 that it would invest $2.5 billion in AI over three years. Bain and Company has partnered with OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. 

In June, Accenture also that it will invest $3 billion in the technology over the next three years. The consulting firm not only said that it plans to double its AI-focused staff to 80,000, through a mix of hiring, acquisitions and training, (The firm has 738,000 employees), it also plans to use generative AI more in its client work and help customers increase their use of the technology. In July, KPMG also pledged a $2 billion investment in Microsoft Cloud and AI services over the next five years, as the company seeks to streamline its client engagement across the audit, tax and advisory sectors.