Beyond the code

Stacey Winters: NSE GenAI Market Leader and Managing Partner for Consumer

With a background in Tax and Risk, Stacey is proof that you don’t need to be a technologist to submerge yourself in AI. Having worked in AI now for three years, she’s learned so much and completely changed her view on what AI will do to our workplace, our work and our market. Stacey believes AI fluency is critical, particularly at Deloitte, and using the technology is the first step in learning about its potential.

How does Deloitte use GenAI to make a difference?
We work with clients to help them re-imagine their business models, using our Trustworthy AI approach. This ensures they can build corporate and social value with GenAI in a way that’s safe, secure and responsible. But helping clients transform with AI is only part of our story. To make a real difference, we must transform ourselves. And that goes way beyond using AI in personal productivity and delivery. It's about embedding it in everything we do, leading the way by bringing it to our clients in all service offerings, and upskilling ourselves so that we can help to transform our profession and what it means to be consultants in the future.

What’s on the horizon?
I’m excited about the roll-out within Deloitte NSE of Solaria, our new productivity platform that includes an AI assistant which can streamline how we do work. It can handle a wide range of tasks and our people will soon be able to create their own customised AI agents, without coding experience. As more people get up to speed on creating these solutions, I think we’ll see a wave of innovation across the firm.  

What does the future look like?
I believe within the next 10 years, most of our clients will have transformed with GenAI. There will be leaders and laggers in each industry, but most will be operating an agentic workforce (autonomous systems that collaborate with humans to manage complex workflows) alongside their human workforce. For our profession, this means we need to embed GenAI in everything we do, ensure our people are fluent in the technology and be able to support our clients in an agentic environment. In the future, we will blend our trusted brand and ethical values with world class human judgement and the exponential power of AI to help our clients to thrive.

Are there exciting career prospects for the younger generation?
Absolutely. Our profession is the learning ground for many business leaders of the future. We have a role to play in society to create GenAI-native business leaders who will enable our economy to flourish. Putting GenAI in the hands of young people has already demonstrated that they can develop faster in their careers and focus their learning on more meaningful experiences. A lot of young people trust the technology implicitly and are more willing to explore opportunities and be creative. This will give rise to more innovation and rapid adoption. We shouldn’t fear the technology; we should embrace it and think about how it can advance our learning and development.

Thomas Avon: Manager in our Swiss innovation team and Chief of Staff to our NSE GenAI Leader, Antonio Russo

Zurich-based Thomas focusses on how AI can transform businesses and bring new ideas to life, leading projects that have helped Deloitte explore uncharted territory in technology. Thomas and his team enable the development and launch of new solutions that respond to the latest market trends. Shortly after ChatGPT arrived, he was involved in one of the first GenAI client projects delivered across Deloitte NSE.

Tell us about that project.
At the time, GenAI was pretty new and not many clients were fully focused on the topic. Most clients wanted first to understand what GenAI meant for them, beyond the hype. Our banking client was a true pioneer, eager to experiment early and build a foundation to expand the promising value of GenAI. That’s one of the great things about Deloitte; our clients trust us to explore fields where nothing has been done before.

What does your average day look like?
I'm part of an innovation team and the common thread across all our projects is the drive to discover new ways to create value. Our clients trust us to help them understand the strategic advantage AI can mean for their organisation. A typical day involves lots of brainstorming to develop fresh ideas and collaborative meetings with clients where we explore opportunities together.

Can you describe your career path?
I come from an engineering academic background, so I’ve been involved with AI right since the start of my career.

While I learnt a lot of the technical side, I’ve always been interested in how technology impacts our lives and business, and I wanted to work at the frontier of those two things. This is why I chose Deloitte. I now get to be directly involved in our NSE GenAI programme, help our clients unlock the potential of the tech and support Deloitte’s own internal transformation.

What do you think will be the key to AI success, for our clients and our firm?
The real key to lasting growth will be finding unique ways to stand out from the competition. Success will come from making existing processes better and completely rethinking how some things are done.

Dearbhaile Flinn: Senior Manager in AI and Data at Deloitte Ireland

With a background in maths and financial analytics, Dearbhaile is part of the AI & Data team that delivers GenAI solutions and strategies to both clients and internal Deloitte colleagues. Since joining Deloitte in 2019, her focus has been on data modernisation and digital solution implementation.

What does GenAI do for you?
For me, GenAI is a facilitator. At its simplest it can help people to get over that first step and beyond the blank page. At a more advanced level, it can free up time for people to focus on more strategic or interesting activities or problem areas.

What career opportunities are out there?
GenAI will allow us to rethink how we approach roles or tasks alongside new opportunities for specialist skills – for example, coding, solutions and agent development, machine learning or prompt engineering. There’s also the trust and privacy side, working on and designing policies that influence how we use GenAI.

Can you share a recent example of innovation?
In Deloitte Ireland, our colleagues recently delivered a single agentic platform to bring together multiple systems and automation processes for a multinational client. These were previously repetitive, low value and time-intensive processes, but thanks to this multi-agent system daily operations workflows were streamlined allowing for faster and more proactive functioning. In turn, this allowed the client teams up to 50% greater capacity to focus on value-add activity and higher complexity problems. This solution is now being expanded to be deployed globally.