Ms Hilary O'Meara:

In every organisation the employers are using it at the knowledge worker level. Organisations need to have principles and adopt responsible AI. Employees have this and it is successful for everybody. Employers must assume their employees are using it to do their work. It is easily accessible. If any organisation claims employers are not using it, that is not correct. Therefore, it comes back to these points relating to education, transparency, reskilling organisations and then putting the guardrails around the technology. For example, the uptake of Microsoft Copilot has been quite good. We are using it in Accenture. It is really helpful in speeding up some of the administrative tasks. Much of the work in Accenture is now driven by artificial intelligence and generative AI. It has not felt like it has been oppressive; it has been the opposite.

We are in the early days. We are talking about the edge cases of the difficulties of this technology. It can do a considerable amount of good and it presents considerable opportunity and value. The overall message we are trying to relay is that if we do not seize the opportunity and are so afraid, we could lose our competitive advantage. We need to find the balance between being responsible and capitalising on the value these technologies can bring.