Big company with around 4,60,000 employees plans to use AI to avoid layoffs

Consulting firms are having to let go of hundreds of employees, despite hiring thousands of fresh graduates to meet new demands. Deloitte LLP, one of the largest in the field, is turning to artificial intelligence (AI) for a solution.

According to a report by Bloomberg, Deloitte is using AI to assess the skills of its current employees and devise strategies to move them from less busy areas to roles that are more in demand. This is part of a larger strategy by the firm to use technology to control the rate of hiring over time.

This year, Deloitte hired 130,000 new employees. However, amidst this hiring spree, the firm had to warn thousands of its employees in the US and UK that their jobs might become redundant due to a restructuring of certain business areas in response to a decrease in demand.

Stevan Rolls, the global chief talent officer at Deloitte, said, “It is obviously a great objective to be able to avoid large swings of hirings and layoffs. You could always be more efficient and effective about finding the right people.”

Deloitte and other professional services firms have started using generative AI, which was made by the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, to eliminate repetitive and time-consuming tasks traditionally assigned to junior staff, such as preparing documents for internal meetings or collecting large amounts of data for client presentations.

With their latest projects, these firms hope that this technology can help them better manage the thousands of new employees they hire each year.

After this year’s hiring spree, Deloitte’s total headcount is nearing 460,000. This is three times the number of new hires compared to a decade ago when the revenue was about half of what it is today.

Rolls added, “Let’s imagine Deloitte was so successful and we doubled our size again, I’d be really worried about hiring a quarter of a million people a year. It might not be fewer, but it might be the same as we hire now.”

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