KPMG's Australian arm developed a 100-page prompt to build an agentic system that prepares tax advice far faster than humans. The debut of ChatGPT in late 2022 triggered rapid experiments that uncovered data security issues, including a document listing thousands of employee credit card numbers, prompting an immediate halt and a ChatGPT block. A leaked internal screenshot and media coverage accelerated negotiations with Microsoft and adoption of OpenAI tools. KPMG built a private AI platform and centralized "KPMG Workbench" offering RAG, multiple LLMs, and agent hosting across member firms. The firm adopted a multi-vendor model and trained staff on chatbot use through 2023. The agentic system reportedly reduces multi-week tasks to a single day.
The Australian arm of consultancy firm KPMG wrote a 100-page prompt to create an agentic system that prepares tax advice far faster than humans. Speaking at analyst outfit Forrester's APAC Technology & Innovation Summit on Tuesday, KPMG chief digital officer John Munnelly said the firm's "life changed" when ChatGPT debuted in late 2022, because he quickly understood it was a tool the consultancy could not ignore.
Not many weeks later, on his return from a holiday, Munnelly turned on his phone to find a long list of missed calls: A graduate staffer had taken a screenshot of the KPMG IT environment that showed it had blocked ChatGPT and shared it on social media with a derisive message about the firm's attitude to innovation. A prominent business newspaper ran a story about the post.
The firm started building a private AI platform, and apps that used it. So did other branches of KPMG around the world, sometimes unwittingly replicating work done by their peers in other nations. The firm eventually decided on a combined approach and created a tool called "KPMG Workbench" that offers retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), LLMs, and agent hosting to all member firms around the world.
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