Steve Chase, KPMG LLP | Google Cloud Next 2025
>> It's like a lot of old friends. >> Good afternoon Cube community, and welcome back to Google Cloud Next here. We're on the back half of day, one of our three days of live coverage from the show floor in Las Vegas, Nevada. My name's Savannah Peterson. Delighted to be learning from all of our fantastic guests with Dave Vellante. We've covered a lot of bases to start the day, >> But now we're going to talk about business.
>> Which is kind of at the core of all of this, isn't it? >> Yeah, you love talking tech, but love talking business too. >> Well, we got to get an overall lay of the land to really understand the trends as analysts, in particular. Steve Chase joining us for this segment.
Steve, thank you so much for taking the time. >> Appreciate you having me here today. >> We were just talking and I see no better way to start a segment than by talking about champagne. We were just talking about drinking your own champagne and the expression of making sure you're trying the product that you're recommending out to your customers. As KPMG, you're obviously talking to a lot of humans, impacting millions of lives. What is it like, right now, in this crucial moment in technology drinking your own champagne inside of KPMG, and what does that look like? >> Well, it's a good place to start.
It is a very exciting time. So I have the pleasure of being the vice chair of AI in digital innovation, and one of our missions is to go from being not great at being early adopters of things to being able to consume technology at pace, which is really hard. And we always say that one of the most difficult things is that change, this change for people, really difficult. I mean, so they're the long pole in the tent. The tech is really hard, complicated, et cetera. But actually when you're rewriting business processes, changing people's jobs, it's really, really difficult.
So it's one of the reasons why clients are looking to us right now. Because they know we have 38,000 knowledge workers in the US, 250,000 globally. Every one of them is a potential user for this technology. That's what we want them to be, want them to be fabulous at it.
And so yeah, we want to drink our own champagne. We are actually using our methodologies for digital transformation to actually transform ourselves. >> And you mentioned that this particular launch from MVP or prototype to production cycle is dramatically shorter. We see that across the industry right now, given the moment, but you were probably doing this internally as well, correct? >> Yeah, absolutely.
So, I mean, what we were talking about that the pace of this technology change where things are announced and then we're quickly, they're showing up in our production systems. It's unlike anything we've ever seen before. And the next model may be materially better, open up new use cases, like research models have completely changed my perception of what some things that you would've said, well, that wouldn't have been a great use case for AI, actually it really becomes one.
So there's a real pressure on us to be able to understand them, bring them to our people as quickly as possible. >> When we see- - And also to do that, I apologize, but to do that in a really responsible way. We always say we want to be bold, fast, responsible, and for us responsible use what we call trusted AI, like that trust in AI, we always put that paramount so we're not rushing to get stuff out before it's ready, before we understand it. But we also need to change the way our processor works, so we could do that at pace.
>> So firms like KPMG have withstood the test of time over various waves. We've seen many of them. Invariably you see massive disruption to companies, to workforce, to business processes. How are you thinking about the future? Because a lot of people, some of our analysts, for instance, David Floyer, believes that there will be a new breed of companies that will be able to do things that are being done today for one-tenth the number of employees, whether it's coding or other business processes or agentic. Going to take some time to evolve. At the same time, you deal with a lot of companies that are incumbents, that are very successful, that are smarter than the many computer companies of the eighties.
They're all gone. And so we've learned from that. So how do you envision just the future organizations and the future of workforce? >> All right, fascinating questions. And the workforce question's on everybody's mind, right? >> Yeah. - I'm a firm believer in that every technology revolution we've ever gone through has sparked a wave of innovation that wouldn't have been necessarily thought of on, before it existed. And I believe that on this one as well.
And I also believe that there's a dislocation between what people do today and what they'll do in the future. So technology opens up a whole new set of opportunities, a whole new set of wants and demands and needs and whatnot. And so that leads to reasonably historic job growth as the technologies end up. And you can look at every technology revolution we've been through. I happen to think this is the most disruptive, I think there's a lot of evidence that it's happening faster and being adopted faster than a number of others.
And so then, what does that mean? And well, what I think that means is there's a lot on most companies to-do list. There's a lot for people to move into doing. I was telling this story about we used to do technology implementations. In the late nineties, we spent all of our time on environments and getting those stood up. Well, cloud made that a lot easier. We don't spend that time on that, but yet the project's already gotten smaller.
We're so much more complicated to rewrite business processes and AI's going to require us to rewrite every business process in organization. >> I want to follow up on your answer, because what you said is true. It's always more wealth, more jobs, more value.
However, I mean, machines have always replaced humans, but this is the first time ever, I think I could say this, that machines are placing humans in cognitive tasks. So while I kind of am an optimist and agree with you, it's very hard to predict what that looks like in the future, because of that cognitive. So what are the things that humans can do that machines can't? It used to be climb stairs, robots can't climb stairs.
Well, they can climb stairs. They sure can, right? >> <inaudible> Boston Dynamics. Yeah. >> They can't make art. Well, they can certainly do that. >> Yes. Right. So it makes it, to your point about pace of change, it makes it very hard to predict.
So I come to KPMG. Do you have a framework to help me navigate through that complexity? >> Sure. Well, I mean let's start with, I believe that this is disruptive technology.
There aren't very many of those that come around. And what I mean when I say disruptive is, iconic brands potentially not existing. That means, but also the other side of that, opportunity to move, take new market share to grow, to go from being fourth to first, those sorts of opportunities. So it's nice that cuts both ways.
We assess this as we assess it that way. Not everybody does, which means that we make this one of the main things that we're doing. And when I said we are using our approach internally, this is the same one we use for digital transformation externally.
But this is a new wave of AI led digital transformation. The scope is the entirety of the organization, from everything from how we sell services to how we build services, how we deliver those services, how we run the firm. And also one of the other things is strategically we had to actually build a new muscle around thinking strategically about distribution channels for product. Are we going to represent our IP in a particular way? Are we going to license that IP? And look, some of those models don't exist yet.
We don't exactly know where they're going to go, but I think resilient companies are the ones that are thinking about this. They're getting out in front of it. You didn't ask me, but I'll tell you. We're seeing the market spread a little bit right now into leaders and some laggards, and there's a lot of reasons why people haven't really started to move. I think agencies may be waking a number of people up and go, wait a second, I wasn't in this augmentation wave. I didn't really do much, but I can't sit out agents.
And obviously you can hear the buzz around here, probably 50% of it or 90% of it's about agents. >> I think about half, at least 50% of the booths say agents. Even just walking over to the stage here today. You're talking about leaders, you're talking about how there's going to be a bit of a paradigm shift.
I totally agree with you in terms of who is leading. Y'all just made a bit of a bet and you have a big announcement here with Google Cloud and their Agent Space. Can you tell us a little bit about that today? >> Yeah, I sure can. Number one, we've had a long time
relationship with Google, both as they're a client of ours, we're a client of theirs. We go to market together. We have a lot of joint clients that leverage Google and KPMG to help them transform their businesses, whether that's in Google Cloud or security, what have you. So we've had a long-standing relationship with them.
We were really excited to get to partner with them on Agent Space as one of their launch partners. We had kind of think about that in a few different ways. One is, we're going to build services and capabilities on top of it. And we've already, in our announcement, you would've seen know KPMG is the first of the accounting firms, the large global accounting firms to have a US law firm. So we've announced that we're going to move into that space, talking about disruption like the accounting firm's coming in. Well, we're the first to do that and we're going to bring Agent Space and Google into that platform.
That's one thing. We're also building services and solutions directly building agents in places like consumer lending in finance and HR, procurement, that we're going to be deploying to clients along with Google. The second thing we have to do with them is bring them internal.
We have a saying inside as part of our program. Our head of HR, Sandy Torsha says, we work hard, but it shouldn't be hard to work here. And we believe by using the capabilities that are deployed with Agent Space, we're going to be able to make it a lot easier for our people to do work and to work here. And then of course we're going to be working with clients on their journeys, like transforming clients against the narrative that they have and how they see disruption, how they want to build their products and services, how they want to overcome regulatory issues or what have you. So anyway, that's the nature of the relationship and we're really excited to work with Google on it.
>> It makes a lot of sense. You mentioned the trend of agent tech. It's obviously everywhere. Your announcement is tied to that.
You also get to see pretty much every corner of the landscape. What are some of the other trends that you're seeing? >> Well, I mean I happened to be in Davos this year, last year it was, which I wasn't at, but it was all about AI. This year, it was all about agents. It's interesting, we get a group of people who are more business owners or business leaders and whatnot, talking about a topic that is pretty technical and hearing how they talk about it.
I think it's one of those things that just resonates with people so they sort of get it. And augmentation with AI is different than agents. Agent feels more like automation.
And going back to your point about people can sort of see that we've been doing that sort of digital deflection, digital transformation for a long time. So it appeals to them. It's really hard for them to get their heads around the next wave of that though, where it eats workflows. They don't exist really in that way.
And where agents are talking to agents and we're bringing those pieces together, envisioning the future of how business processes, what functions will look like in organizations. I mean, I think that's a trend we're hearing. Another is, early in this wave, there was a lot of talk about responsible use and then there was not as much regulations we sort of thought there might be around this, but there were some states and other things. And obviously EU, I'm hearing a lot more because there's no way you get into a more orchestrated or semi-autonomous set of agents, especially talking to other agents without really strong guardrails and guidelines around that. Real-time auditing, probably with auditing agents.
And that's something we want to lead in and we have a lot of point of view around and are working with clients on right now. So prepare the ground to be ready to take on agents. So that's a trend we're hearing a lot about as well.
>> You mentioned the market as leaders and laggers, the market's bifurcated. And my question is, I mean some markets, especially in tech, because there's so much hype, it's not necessarily best to be first. I'll give an example of where it was actually advantageous to be first was probably ERP. Those companies who leaned into ERP early thrive. An example where maybe it wasn't best to be first it was big data, Hadoop. If I lean too far into Hadoop and then Spark or BigQuery or Snowflake comes along, maybe a little simpler and better and I had a lot of tech debt that I have to unwind.
Why, in your view, maybe you don't have this view, but I'll ask it anyway this way. Why is AI an imperative now? >> There's some quotes running around out there, I don't want to misquote, but I think Mark Cuban said something like, there's going to be two kinds of companies, ones that are AI first in the way they think, and then there's going to be ones going out of business. I kind of resonate with that sort of thinking, which is this isn't about the tech you're developing.
That is not what I think is the imperative. The imperative is, I need to be able to think with this new co-partner, this new intelligence, we're moving into a period where intelligence is almost scalable and in a version of not free, but near free. And in that market, I got to be thinking about, I got to run finance different. I got to be thinking about capital allocation differently. I'm a business leader who needs to be thinking about that this new capability allows me to do whatever my business is different than I have been doing it.
And that's what we believe. And that's when we're seeing a lot of evidence of that as we, the best leaders right now are the ones aren't necessarily the technologists. I mean they're great too, but it's the business leader who's adopted this mindset that this is my job. I need to figure out how to really use this and make it a critical part of the service I offer, the function I deliver, or what have you.
>> How you apply that intelligence, where to apply it. >> That is imperative. And if you're not thinking that way, then you underappreciate things like my trust environment, you underappreciate things and maybe you don't invest in it. I underappreciate the dollars I need to put into data curation right now, and what am I going to do there? These are the things that if you haven't made those investments and the ones that take a while to catch up on, then you maybe don't catch up. I don't want to be alarmist. I happen
to believe we're at the very stages of this wave. But I also do believe over the next five to 10 years, we're going to rewrite business processes across the entire enterprise and new services will develop and it'll be up to us to take advantage of that. >> AI makes us smarter, no question. And we're not going to go back to being dumber and nobody's going to want that.
>> And I think you just brought up something that I think is really interesting that's been a theme of our day so far today, when we were talking about the technical leader versus the visionary, so to speak. Not that you can't be visionary and technical, definitely not saying that these are just two different business profiles of humans. But I think what's really bubbled to the surface today for me has been we ask people a lot for their advice or what are you saying or how are you helping companies? It's get curious, tinker around, keep playing with this stuff yourself physically, rather than just entrusting somebody else. Go do it and then get collaborative across your team and say, Hey, would this be possible? Or call up KPMG and say, you know what? We were never able to do this before, but we've always wanted to solve this problem.
Is this going to let us do that? And I think it's this exploration of that Z-axis that we're sort of getting to play with that's going to really separate those superstars of the future from the ones we currently know. >> And I think this is, like listen, and change is the hardest thing that humans do, which is why we always say it's the longest pole in this tent. Change is hard, and it's one of the reasons why it's the number one thing we do with clients is help them.
We try to make the easy stuff easy and put them in a position where they can make the decisions that are going to be hard. A lot of times the question you asked about what's going to happen in the workforce, well guess what? We know the workforce is going to look different than it does today. We know they're going to have a set of skill sets that is different. Let's talk about that, right? Let's be honest and talk about that.
And that sometimes is hard. And also to be able to say, we don't know, but here's what we're committed to. Here's how we're thinking about it. We want to put more people in the field serving customers out of the logistics in trying to get things to, we want to serve clients differently. This is going to open up that opportunity for growth. I don't know.
>> That's how we think about it. This is a good time for the Jeff Bezos where he says, people always ask me what's going to change, and I've been asking you what's going to change? He's like, I think the more important question is what's not going to change? And of course, know Amazon. com people, they're never going to want to pay more. >> Unless it's for bad customer service like we had in that conversation today.
>> For a product though, he means right? They're never going to go on slower delivery or worse customer service. So applying AI in those areas that aren't going to change, what's not going to change? >> Well, first off, I think people really appreciate human interaction differently. In a world where we're starting to, we're seeing a real differentiation, if I can deploy more resources in and get that connection.
So that's an interesting dilemma though, because this actually with agent swarms and other things, I can do all this stuff. I can interview people with voice agents, I can do all these different things. I think there's something about human-human contact that's going to be really valuable. I actually think we're going to start to see the emergence of non-digital. There's something about that, and I'm going to really respect that. Remember, they used to tell us it was 50% of the job was showing up.
I think it's going to be more than 50% of the job is being there, being in these interactions. >> Humanity in a digital age. >> Humanity in digital age. I mean that's actually, that's better. I'm going to take that. You might find it on my LinkedIn, but yeah...
>> I stole it from John Mack. >> Did you? Okay. Well never mind that, but... >> I curated it from John. John Mack has started Notes to Humanity and his whole thing is write a note as what humanity means to you in a digital age.
And it's profound. It's not technology. >> So this is a bit more, I don't know, technical, but data. We're strong believers that companies that are managing their data and got their hands around it, understand it.
I mentioned the word curation that have curated the data sets in a way that they're able to be useful. That's a dollar well spent no matter what you do. Training. We've gotten away from training, especially post-COVID. And I don't mean KPMG, I mean generally. The amount of dollars that are going into real thinking about what it takes to do the job. Well, guess what? If you're changing every business process, you're going to need to be training.
And what we're getting off campuses, colleges are going to need to change too, because we're going to need critical thinking. And I don't think that changes, but we kind of got into a place where we were putting people into a spot and they were doing a thing. Well, we're more like polymaths now than we are. >> Yeah, well, and we assume just because we put them in that spot and they do the thing that they can't do another thing. And I think that's what a lot of the big argument that we hear around AI taking jobs comes from, you just reminded me of my college professor shout out to Lance Bennett.
I remember asking him, what am I supposed to get out of college in some very hyperachiever moment I was having? And he said, "Learn how to think. That will always be valuable. " And I thought, oh, okay. I can do that. >> That's not going to change. - One of the things we believe that really differentiates KPMG, and certainly there's others that maybe make this claim, is we really understand how industries work. And the trust has been placed in us, in the capital markets to understand how companies operate through audit, the work that we do in tax.
And we think that's actually super valuable as we help clients decide where are they going to take these businesses. And also learnings from other industries as you bring those forward, like everybody's industry is now... Every industry describes themselves as a tech industry and everyone's a tech company, whether they're a bank or a healthcare company or whatever. And we think that helps too. >> Yeah, no, I think, well, obviously it helps. Look at how successful y'all are doing. Love to hear it, Steve. All right. Final question
for you and then we'll wrap this up. All right. When we're hanging out at Google Cloud next in 2026, what do you hope to be able to say then that you can't yet say today? >> Well, we made our announcement today around Agent Space. I can't wait to talk about the client successes we've had with Agent Space. I can't wait to talk about how we've made it a lot easier to work, even though we work hard, made it a lot easier to work.
The solutions that we'll be able to jointly talk about that we built together. I mean, I'm going to go back to the three things we said we're going to do and we're going to go and do them. And I will say that is something that a lot of companies are struggling with is getting things out of POC, out of announcement land, into making it happen.
That's who we are. We're going to make things happen. >> Love to hear it, Steve. I have no doubt that you're going to make it happen and we can't wait to talk about it.
Thank you for taking the time today. >> Thanks, Steve. - Awesome. Thank you all. >> Really appreciate it. And thank you, Dave. And thank all of you for tuning into our live coverage here at Google Cloud. Next in Las Vegas, Nevada. My name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.
2025-04-14 10:24
