How does technology, such as automation or AI, have an impact on your role?

Hi Kayla,

Thanks for your question! Technology has a huge impact on my role in TD as it effects what I do in different ways. The first thing you'd think of is how it affects me directly, through our own use of technology. We make use of a few different technologies to assist in the TD process, from improving our efficiency to entirely new service offerings. For example, as you mentioned automation, we use automation tools to create databooks in Excel, and to format our reports and analysis in PowerPoint and Excel into EY style without needing to manually do this, which saves a lot of time and ensures all our work is consistent. We use analytics tools such as PowerBI to produce dynamic, interactive data dashboards and Alteryx to work with large datasets, allowing us to cleanse and process data far more quickly and accurately than we could in Excel.

These tools make our lives easier by improving the speed and ease with which we can produce analysis, but they also affect our client. By saving time on more basic processes, we can put more effort into deeper and more value-add analysis. We can also offer our clients technology based service offerings, such as providing access to a dynamic dashboard in PowerBI.

Our clients use of technology also impacts our role. If we are working with a business that uses certain technologies in their operations, then understanding these technologies will be key to understanding their business. We might even be working with a technology company itself, where their entire business is the technology. As such, familiarising yourself with the types of technology that are used by different businesses in different sectors is really important.

The technology we use at EY is changing all the time, and as technology develops this will inevitably lead to new tools being developed, so the way technology impacts my role today is likely going to be very different to how it impacts it in the future. I think that going forward, there will be a continuation in the current trend of automating parts of the process that are more manual and thus lend themselves to being automated. As AI technology develops and becomes more accessible, I think we could see automation of even more complicated parts of our analysis, such as automatically generating report commentary to explain our analysis.

I hope this helps & please let me know if you have any other questions!