Consulting firm KPMG has announced plans to apply IBM’s Watson cognitive computing technology to its professional services offerings. The agreement, including a focus on auditing services, builds on several recent KPMG initiatives demonstrating the promise of cognitive technologies.

“The cognitive era has arrived,” said Lynne Doughtie, KPMG LLP Chairman and CEO.

“KPMG’s use of IBM Watson technology will help advance our team’s ability to analyse and act on the core financial and operational data so central to the health of organizations and the capital markets. In addition to the unprecedented possibilities for enhancing quality, the potential for cognitive and related technologies to help us pursue new business offerings is extraordinary.”

Cognitive technology enables greater collaboration between humans and systems, providing the ability to communicate in natural language and analyse massive amounts of data to deliver insights more quickly. Watson integrates machine learning and other artificial intelligence technologies into a scalable system that can be accessed through a range of applications. 

“Auditing and similar knowledge services are increasingly challenged with tackling immense volumes of unstructured data. Cognitive technologies such as Watson can transform how this data is understood and how critical decisions are made,” said John Kelly, senior vice president, cognitive solutions and IBM Research.

“By applying Watson, KPMG is taking a forward-looking approach to extending its expertise, helping professionals and clients gain new insights from critical enterprise information.”

Evolving Professional Services

Many of KPMG’s audit, tax, advisory and other professional services rely heavily on judgment-driven processes. Adding cognitive technology’s massive data analysis and innovative learning capabilities to these activities has the potential to advance traditional views on how talent, time, capital and other resources are deployed by professional services organizations.

One current KPMG initiative is focused on employing supervised cognitive capabilities to analyse much larger volumes of structured and unstructured data related to a company’s financial information, as auditors “teach” the technology how to fine-tune assessments over time. This enables audit teams to have faster access to increasingly precise measurements that help them analyse anomalies and assess whether additional steps are necessary.

This example also highlights how cognitive technology is further advancing improvements to sampling processes, in which auditors review subsets of data to analyse thousands or millions of actions to draw conclusions. Cognitive technology helps allow for the possibility of a larger percentage of the data to be analysed, providing KPMG professionals the potential to obtain enhanced insights into a client’s financial and business operations. At the same time, cognitive-enabled processes allow auditors to focus on higher value activities, including offering additional insights around risks and other related findings.

“Including cognitive technology with KPMG’s innovative capabilities, robust methodologies and processes, and 100-plus year history of excellence, is a real game changer that underscores our commitment to reinforcing confidence in the capital markets,” added Doughtie.

In other Watson news, Hilton Worldwide has announced a collaboration to pilot “Connie”–the first Watson-enabled robot concierge in the hospitality industry. Connie draws on domain knowledge from Watson and WayBlazer to inform guests on local tourist attractions, dining recommendations and hotel features and amenities. Connie, named for Hilton’s founder Conrad Hilton, marks the first time IBM has developed a Watson-enabled robot for the hospitality market.