PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP announced plans today to invest $1 billion in generative artificial intelligence that will expand its offerings for clients in the U.S. to use the technology to power their businesses.

As part of the investment, PwC also announced an expanded partnership with Microsoft Corp. to build on ChatGPT developer OpenAI LP’s GPT-4 AI large language model and Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service to provide further support for clients.

Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence that is trained on large amounts of data and is capable of “generating” new information based on natural language prompts, such as ordinary conversation or questions. OpenAI’s ChatGPT AI chatbot has become stratospherically popular over the past few months because of its ability to answer questions and hold human-seeming conversations. Generative AI can also summarize large documents, generate insights, write research papers or act as a research assistant.

These capabilities make generative AI models a powerful tool for numerous business applications including writing reports, preparing compliance documents, analyzing and evaluating business reports, distilling operations data into intelligible information or creating marketing materials based on customer data.

“Our investment will enable us to help our clients successfully navigate through this remarkable moment in the evolution of technology: helping them adopt and implement this technology at enterprise scale, with a focus on responsible and trusted use,”  Joe Atkinson, chief products and technology officer at PwC US told SiliconANGLE. “Bringing the power of our brand together with the capability of our people means we can help our clients differentiate themselves while at the same time giving our teams the tools they need to provide greater value and deliver with greater efficiency.”

Atkinson said that PwC is currently upskilling all of its 65,000 employees in the use of AI tools in order to equip them with the knowledge and skills to navigate the new capabilities, adding, that that AI technology will “transform the way work gets done across PwC as well as the way value gets delivered to our clients.”

PwC added that the company has already begun using generative AI services for clients with the Azure OpenAI Service within various industries including insurance, aviation and healthcare. According to the company, the generative AI models have already helped them reduce costs and boost operations.

“Our collaboration with PwC and OpenAI will be a game-changer that opens the floodgates for businesses to experience generative AI applications in a safe and secure manner,” said Eric Boyd, corporate vice president of AI platform at Microsoft. The software and cloud giant also recently announced a $10 billion multiyear investment in OpenAI, which gave it greater access to the company’s Azure cloud resources.

A survey from Salesforce Inc. in March of more than 500 information technology leaders revealed that a majority, 67%, thought that generative AI would be a priority for business in the next 18 months given the current state of play and 57% called it a “game changer.”

This news follows PwC’s partnership with Harvey to build a generative AI chatbot to assist its lawyers with providing legal services. Harvey is backed by OpenAI’s Startup Fund and founded on the company’s GPT-4 AI technology, which is trained to provide an AI model that can streamline legal work.

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