(upbeat music) I get to talk to CMOs all day long and in hundreds of conversations.

And so, and I have to start one thing, the penguin thing, I just have to connect the dots.

So CMO huddles, a group of penguins is a huddle.

Penguins are like CMOs in that they are incredibly resilient and problem solving.

If you want, I have my penguin hat in the bag.

I will help share that later.

Now, the problem solving issue that has come up is generative AI.

What can you do?

How do you do it?

What is this thing?

And what's so interesting is the crawl, walk, run model applies across the board.

And if I looked at our community alone, you would be surprised how many are still in the crawl area.

So if you're in the crawl area, that's okay because probably 25% of folks are because their legal people are saying, don't touch it or some other reason or they can't figure it out.

So the next area is sort of the, we're walking along a little bit and that's probably about 40% of our community has individuals, but no company-wide plan.

They don't necessarily have, people are starting to use it, they're finding applications.

It's usually in the marketing department and the reason is in the marketing department because people are creating content for it.

That's which is what seems to be the lowest hanging fruit.

Then there's the running group.

And that group is saying, hey, you know what?

We're gonna, marketing is gonna take the lead and we're gonna have a plan with it and we're gonna use it slightly beyond content creation.

And one CMO said, and I love the story, she said, I found the person who was most against generative AI and said, you're in charge.

And it worked brilliantly and converted them.

So then there's this next level, which is I'm gonna call it light speed.

And that gets us to Lauren Boyman and KPMG because at KPMG, as you'll find out very quickly, they are not just applying it in the marketing department, but they actually asked Lauren to help drive the corporate-wide initiative.

So Lauren, talk, tell us.

What is, so first of all, KPMG is consulting and auditing.

That's a lot.

It's a huge global company.

How are you getting your hands around generative AI?

It is a huge global company.

Well, first of all, thanks for having me here.

It is not a radio station, although it does sound like one.

We are a huge global professional services firm that is best known as an auditing and tax firm, although we have tremendous capabilities in the technology and innovation space and a lot of deep relationships with all the big tech companies where we do implementations with ServiceNow and Google and lots of the names that you would know.

So in addition to my day job, which is running marketing for the Americas, and I've been at KPMG for about four and a half years.

And in that time, we've done a lot of marketing transformation, specifically with marketing technology and redoing the marketing technology stack and thinking about account-based marketing.

And that has all been very transformative.

And I think it's changed the mindset of a lot of the marketers who have been there for a long time.

We brought in a lot of new talent as well to sort of balance out the team capabilities overall.

And it's given everybody a mindset of change and diving into technology and embracing it.

So when AI came to be and KPMG put in place a new vice chair for AI and digital innovation, he asked me to run a portion of the enterprise-wide transformation, which I'll tell you a little bit about, focused on marketing and sales.

So it's all about embedding AI in how we market and how we sell.

So our go-to-market capabilities, as well as our brand perception.

I can go a little bit more into detail. - Well, I want to say a couple of things.

What's so interesting is, if you think about marketing right now, you probably have the largest tech stack in your organization anyway.

So it makes sense that, but you also sort of initiated a change management and a lot of the usage of these tools and embracing it involves change management.

So, but I'm curious how you, and so that led to you sort of having this second job.

Like you're the AI czar or whatever.

Tell me, talk about that job and that role and what your mandate is in that context. - Yeah.

So I like to joke that I feel like I work at a big company during the day and a startup at night.

So although those two jobs are very quickly intersecting.

So the sort of day job around marketing, we had already stood up Tiger teams to test out new AI and Gen AI technologies and to put different pilots in place.

And that was going well, but there was a lot of a desire for other parts of the firm and really just natural need for other parts of the firm to leverage those same technologies.

'Cause some of what we were using were more kind of broad enterprise horizontal technologies and not just specific to the marketing sector or marketing function.

So then the new job comes, the AI job.

And that really, like I said, it's about marketing and not just the marketing brand perception of KPMG, but also the operations of the marketing department and how we get the marketing work done.

But the new part where we have set up AI transformation program and we've put a name to it and I can tell you about that.

But the new aspect of that is really the sales and go to market side, because how our professionals do proposals, how they develop and get thought leadership out to market.

For us, speed to market and being the first one to pick up your client or email your client is half the battle, right?

Time kills all deals.

So for us, I viewed Gen AI as the ability to take our massive amount of thought leadership, which we have, and people, we've got thousands of partners that are always generating content and thought leadership.

And some of it is good and should go out into the world and some of it shouldn't necessarily go out with a lot of amplification or media behind it.

But I saw Gen AI as the ability to get to market faster and to personalize that content in ways that our professionals just don't necessarily have the time to do or necessarily the insight or capability to do that quickly, because what we're able to do is connect that content to the data and insights that we have about individual companies and put those two and two together and then put the insights in front of, or in the hands of a human being, a partner who has that relationship with an executive at a company and can say in kind of record speed, this is what this new tax regulation is going to mean for you, right?

With all the caveats in place, but having the ability to get from legislation drops or something comes out from the SEC and we are able to talk to our clients with an insightful conversation and personalized conversation really quickly is a game changer.

So there's a lot of different pieces in this thing.

Some of this is improving brand perception.

Some of this is improving customer service and being able to give information to them.

Some of it is internal, how you all actually do your work.

It's a lot.

You said you named it.

Yeah, okay.

So the enterprise-wide transformation, we felt like internally we had to give it a name because like I said up front, KPMG is a very large place.

And at times we can feel like, every large company can feel like it's different businesses, but we are trying to put in place and really believe that AI can be a game changer across the employee experience internally, but also for how we service clients and the way that we get the work done.

So we've called the program Little A Big IQ.

So it's AIQ and it's called, the tagline is powered by people, enabled by AI.

And so we're very intentionally had the little A and the big IQ because the point is that the artificial piece is a smaller piece.

The larger piece, the human intelligence, the person, the human in the loop is just incredibly important and critical to be honest.

So we've put a name, a visual identity around this, and then we've put a lot of kind of activation and programming around it that enables people to feel excited about it, feel like it's one firm approach and like they're encouraged to use technology, right?

We don't want this to be something that people are doing like in the dark and not talking about and saying like, well, I'm getting half my job done because I'm using AI.

We're encouraging it and celebrating different use cases and celebrating those aha moments where people can, we're actually, we've got a program, an employee engagement program where people are putting their aha moments on our internal social networking platform called Viva Engage.

And in other ways, we're recognizing and celebrating people who are using AI.

So I've got a program for my team called Marketeer of the Month.

And this month I'm recognizing the top five AI users.

And like people aren't, they're kind of blown away by that 'cause they're like, oh, I didn't realize she would be using it so much.

And like, what are you using it for?

And so we're talking about different use cases.

We've got lots of different communities where people are sharing prompts, sharing their best practices.

And we're doing that within the marketing department, within the creative services department, but then the firm overall is really doing that.

So AIQ is meant to represent a broad enterprise transformation program, everything from the role I'm playing, which is around how we market and sell our services to the services that we sell, disruption, and thinking about really future state and how we should be disrupting ourselves before the industry does that for us.

And then the last pillar in the transformation kind of structure is around our internal and middle and back office and being more efficient in how we use AI.

So we're really thinking about it from a kind of front to back and AIQ represents that.

So again, a lot of stuff going on.

And I sort of see it, imagining you're kind of like client number one for what obviously is a practice area to be, if not already out there.

Yeah, we actually call ourselves client zero.

Client zero.

You know, the terminology has, we are using that terminology with AIQ and that's like how we're telling our client zero story.

And we are gonna be doing a blog series where we're gonna talk about the different aspects of us being client zero.

We're already doing a podcast series internally, but we're gonna bring that externally and start talking more about the transformation.

But yeah, it is, there's a tremendous amount going on, a lot of piloting, a lot of investment in specific areas where we're doing testing.

So within the marketing department, we are, actually it's not just within marketing, but within content generation.

So marketing is one of the teams.

We have our insights team who generates thought leadership.

We have our corporate communications team.

We even have our tax and auditing team who produce a lot of their own thought leadership and again, the professional services firm.

So lots of smart people writing their thoughts down and that happens in lots of different pockets across the organization.

And so we are enabling them to use AI and Gen AI tools to get to market faster and to create more externally ready materials.

So we've created some custom apps that we're giving now to, and then there's gotta be a lot of governance around this, around who has access to these tools and 'cause we don't wanna flood the market with lots of content that we don't believe is quality, but we're testing content generation and then looking at the impact that it has and the time savings benefit, which has a lot of implications because people can look at those metrics and say, oh, that means you can do without 75% of me, but then the really fast follow to that is us talking about how it's not replacing you, but it is going to replace people who don't use it.

So that's the big line that we're saying internally.

AI is not gonna replace humans, but it is definitely going, humans that are using AI are definitely gonna replace humans that are not using AI.

So one of the things this conference promises is real world cases and some of the sizzle, not just the stake, which you've really laid out a comprehensive program.

Talk about your AI podcast for South by.

Okay, I love this example.

So one of the objectives that we had within marketing was to create AI driven experiences and make executives feel like they understand the power of what AI can do.

And you think about who our audience is.

I mean, we serve buyers across the spectrum within a corporation, but like our main buyer set is auditing our corporate controllers or CFOs, chief tax officers, CHRO officers.

And so these aren't necessarily people who are constantly hands-on with new technology.

So we have created a brand activation that we are taking.

We started it first in South by Southwest a couple of months ago, and we built it really quickly internally to kind of get it up and running.

And it is a AI podcast.

So AI hosted podcast, and we named it Skylar.

So essentially you go into this booth and you can have a conversation with Skylar.

It's a five minute podcast, and it's all AI.

So you're actually talking to AI and people walked out of that conversation and had a completely new perspective on what technology would mean.

Because honestly, the conversation, I did it a couple of times myself.

It felt so natural.

It just felt like you were vibing with a moderator like we're doing right now. - So I'm gonna be replaced is what you're saying.

Yes, thank you.

With 400 episodes of the podcast, it's time to move to the bot.

Okay, I'm ready. - You will be augmented by AI.

But people who had never experienced AI before walked out of that booth and said, wow, that's pretty cool.

And that was an experience that we built stitching a few different AI technologies together.

But that is an example of what we're trying to bring to market.

I mean, if anyone, it's not a product of ours per se, but it's something that can give people an understanding of what the art of the possible is. - Well, and it also just enhances and sort of transforms the brand image because as you suddenly are starting to do things and more and more of these are out there, it's just, oh, okay, they kind of get it.

They're at least playing with these things.

One of the big issues that a lot of CMOs run into is just sort of the guardrails and how do you make sure that the data is safe?

How do you do this?

And I know that you guys are doing, 'cause you talked about a lot of data, you have sandboxes and things.

What do you talk about your guardrails? - We are an auditing firm after all.

So at the core, we are all about driving trust and safety.

So we have not obviously access to open AI's GPT.

We have our own kind of containerized GPT called AIQChat.

And we've got different sections that are walled off for different business areas.

And obviously we don't train any of the models on customer data.

Every interaction with that chatbot is brand new, right?

So it starts from a clean slate and there's lots of training, as you can imagine, training around how to use AI in a responsible way and how to put guardrails in place so that people understand how to responsibly use it and that they know that they shouldn't be using, certainly shouldn't be using external tools, but we're really encouraging them to use.

So between our internal tools, so between the tools itself, the kind of constraints and guardrails that are built into the language models and the training of the tools and then the training of the people itself, we have a really strong kind of trusted AI program.

That is a service that we are selling.

So we help companies come up with their own, trusted AI policies and programs in place and actually our impact plan, which is a document that we use to provide transparency around all of our ESG related items.

We, for the first time, put AI into our impact plan.

It just came out a couple of days ago.

So we're really proud about that. - I would think, and as we get close to the wrap up, that there would be a lot of fear among consultants in particular, who would think, "Oh my God, well, if we were just gonna go into the GPTs and solve the problems themselves."

How are your consultants embracing these tools to sort of, again, it's about augmentation, not replacement? - Yeah.

So while KPMG is a, I would say, because our core is auditing and you'd expect us to be really conservative, that is not the culture at all.

Like people are all about continuous learning and experimentation.

And we have between, kind of grassroots challenges that we've put in place and like little campfires that people put in place.

We call them the campfires where people are actually using the tools to develop their own thing.

And we're recognizing that and celebrating that.

So it has to do a lot with the culture and KPMG just overall has a real culture of experimentation and drive for innovation.

So I think it was a natural kind of evolution of what we're doing.

We're just really taking that to the next level so that we can encourage use and celebrate the wins that people are experiencing. - Okay, real quick.

One do and one don't for companies trying to drive enterprise-wide adoption of generative AI. - One do.

So I would say within a function, within a marketing group, put a tiger team in place because there are, we've done a whole analysis around personas and segmentation and different just ways that people adopt new technologies.

And there are those people who are front of the pack and want to try new things and you should celebrate that.

So I had a tiger team we put in place and they were the first ones to try out some of these new technologies and then highlighting them on all hands calls and such.

So tiger teams I think can really help to highlight the best behavior that you want to really celebrate. - Okay, one don't. - One don't.

I would say, don't not use it yourself as a leader.

You have to be hands-on, you have to get your hands dirty and really use it.

And once people see that and they see you talking about how you're using it or you show up at the top of the list then people really have no choice but to adopt it and feel excited about it.

So. - So this is about change management, this is about competing with yourself, this is about looking at it much broader.

If you're just looking at this as content, you are missing the point.

Lauren, thank you. - Thank you. (audience applauding) (upbeat music)

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