To keep enhancing our (digital) services to clients, we are constantly strengthening KPMG N.V.’s own technological capabilities. In 2023/2024, we continued to invest in best-in-class tools and the training our workforce needs to maximize their potential, as well as strengthening our Alliance relationships and developing joint innovations. For our firm, digital tools are never a goal in themselves; instead, they are an enabler for further improving the quality of our services and solutions, supporting our people in their work, and increasing public trust in organizations and financial markets.
Putting AI in the hands of our people
We believe the human attributes our people bring to every project – understanding, creativity, integrity, and professional judgment – are what set us apart. We also believe that, supported by the right technology, responsibly applied, we can improve the quality of our work in time- and cost-efficient ways. By using technology to handle routine and repetitive tasks faster and more accurately than a human could, we empower our people to spend more time on more creative, strategic, rewarding work and to focus on adding value in client engagements through the human touch.
AI is a particularly powerful enabler for this. During 2023/2024, we rolled out several (generative) AI tools, with the goal of enabling our people to work more productively and effectively. To do this, we leveraged the platforms invested in and developed by KPMG International. As well as deploying generic AI tooling – such as the virtual assistant Bing Copilot and the programming assistant GitHub Copilot – we also deployed our own internal, custom-made, AI-powered chatbots: Advisory GPT to support our Advisory colleagues and our large-language model Clara AI, an AI assistant developed together with Microsoft, to help answer auditors’ methodology questions.
We recognize the importance of using these new technologies responsibly and are aware that they could pose additional risks to our service quality. We therefore train our people to apply professional skepticism when using data obtained from these tools.
Innovation through collaboration
KPMG N.V. has digital Alliances with world-leading technology partners – such as Microsoft, SAP, and ServiceNow – carefully chosen to strengthen our Advisory offering through value-added capabilities that support our clients’ digitalization journeys. We continued to invest in and grow our digital Alliance ecosystem in 2023/2024, including through joint thought leadership, lead development, go-to-market events for prospects and clients, and AI innovations.
Having welcomed SAP as an official Alliance partner in 2024, we made good progress on setting up our joint go-to-market proposition in selected areas. A major challenge facing our clients is the complex move from on-premise solutions to the cloud; together with SAP, we can facilitate the process with carefully customized approaches. Our new partnership has already yielded multiple client wins.
For our Netherlands-based clients with international operations, we can collaborate with system integration partners to deliver solutions at scale. Furthermore, our global KPMG Delivery Network (KDN) enables us to scale, adapt, and seamlessly deliver global solutions for local applications.
Digitally enabled audit
To ensure we continuously deliver audit services of the highest quality, we are increasingly complementing and supplementing the fundamental human capabilities of our people with powerful digital tools. KPMG Clara – our unique, smart, global audit platform – integrates new and emerging technologies with advanced capabilities that leverage AI, audit automation, and data visualization. This supports our teams and clients by enhancing our audit methodology and contributing to improved audit quality.
We embedded another AI tool, MindBridge, in 2023/2024. This strategic alliance further boosts our digital audit processes by helping us analyze transactions on a more granular level. With MindBridge, we are better able to identify high-risk transactions, increase transparency, visibility, and explainability and provide insights to our clients across a variety of sectors.
One of our priorities in Assurance is to adopt low-code or no-code software where possible, such as Alteryx and OutSystems. In 2023/2024, we trained more than 100 audit professionals to use coding tools and can already see the benefits of this approach in action. As well as saving time for auditors in the field – enabling them to focus on applying their professional judgment – and leaving our programming experts free to tackle more complex development projects, this software enables auditors to, for example, conduct three-way reconciliation on an entire data population rather than only verifying a sample. This leads to more comprehensive, trustworthy, and high-quality results. See Public trust (new window) for more information on the importance of audit quality and the Governance (new window) chapter of our sustainability statement for details on audit quality (new window) as a material topic for KPMG N.V.
Investing in our broader digital capabilities
At KPMG N.V.’s Amstelveen headquarters, we have built a digitally enabled co-creation space – the Insights Center – where we work with clients and prospects on topics related to strategic planning, innovation, re-platforming, AI, and ESG. We can also showcase our Alliance’s state-of-the-art digital assets and capabilities. In 2023/2024, we held nearly 70 Insights Center sessions with clients, creating important business value across Assurance and Advisory. Meanwhile, we advanced our AI collaboration with the University of Amsterdam by investing in selected AI research projects.
In our Business Services function, we continued our transition to a new target operating model. Progress in 2023/2024 included significant improvements to our new IT backbone, formed of a single application for simplified employee processes. Our investment has improved the connections between – and our control over – these different processes.
Above all, we focused on improving the digital savviness of our workforce, through a combination of reskilling, upskilling, and hiring new colleagues with technical profiles. Training and development are fundamental to our digital transformation; after all, we recognize that new tooling is only a worthwhile investment if people know why, when, and how to use it. In 2023/2024, as well as helping auditors develop basic coding skills, we rolled out our renewed Digital MBA for leadership-level colleagues, helping them better understand AI, its impact on our business, and the benefits for our clients in turn. We also enriched our learning curriculum with digital and data e-learnings, including AI learning paths, for various levels and roles.
Managing data responsibly
Innovative technologies are a game-changer for quality, agility, efficiency, and cost competitiveness – but the fast pace of digitalization also poses challenges for us and our clients, especially regarding data security and privacy. At KPMG N.V., we have long been committed to collecting and using data safely and responsibly, always protecting the information entrusted to us by our clients, employees, and external partners.
Our approach includes an innovation governance framework, InnoWay, covering the process from decision-making to implementation and use. In 2023/2024, KPMG N.V. was certified at Cyber Maturity Assessment level 3 for the first time, reflecting the further improvements we have made to our data security framework.
We continuously ensure we have strong guardrails in place: not only because it is our duty to protect our stakeholders and their data, but also because responsible data practices are key to our transition away from a purely process-based technology approach to a more data-focused one. As such, in the 2022/2023 financial year, we welcomed a Chief Data Officer to Business Services, responsible for overseeing this strategic transformation. This includes establishing a new data strategy and platform for KPMG N.V., the implementation of which will continue in 2024/2025.
Given its importance for our organization, data security has been designated as a material topic for KPMG N.V. Please see the Governance (new window) chapter of our sustainability statement for more details on our related impacts, risks, and opportunities, as well as on how we manage these through policies, actions, targets, and metrics.
Outlook
We will continue pursuing our AI program in order to fully embed and leverage AI capabilities and tools at KPMG N.V. – not for the sake of technology itself, but in order to grow our productivity and improve the solutions we take to market both for Assurance and for Advisory. In doing so, we aim to become a digital frontrunner in professional services and be recognized as a client-centric, innovative, and digitally enabled partner.
One of our top priorities for 2024/2025 is to continue putting AI in the hands of our people. Specifically, we aim to scale up the roll-out of Microsoft 365 Copilot to improve our productivity, emphasize new releases, and increase adoption of Advisory GPT and Clara AI by our people. We will also further enhance our support for clients' digital transformation programs, through our Alliance partnerships (amongst others Microsoft, SAP and ServiceNow) and by launching industry-relevant digital and AI-embedded solutions to the market. In doing so, we aim to maximize our alignment with the global KPMG AI program and investments.