PwC on an agentic AI future: Your people will become the ‘fundamental differentiator’

$55.4 billion-revenue professional services giant PwC is ahead of the curve on AI.

It’s been at the “forefront” of the AI workplace revolution – for PwC, AI is not a nice to have, it is a must have.

“We need people to embrace it”; to do this, they need to have the space to experiment with a range of AI tools (albeit with the right guardrails and tone from the top).

This creates the right AI mindset and culture within PwC, as well as ensures that the company’s 370,000 employees globally can build the muscle of using AI in their day-to-day work.

That’s what Prasun Shah, Partner, Global CTO & AI Leader, Workforce Consulting, at PwC, shared with UNLEASH during an exclusive interview at Workday’s Elevate conference in London.

Credit: Workday.

PwC and Workday have a close relationship – PwC currently uses Workday as its HR system of record.

However, in this new era of agentic AI, Shah is excited to see the HR tech vendor also become the agent system of record.

“To me, that’s very powerful” – it enables organizations to be able to manage their AI digital workforce, as well their people.

Read on to find out how PwC is leveraging agentic AI, and specifically why being a skills-first organization is helping the professional services giant thrive.

How agents and humans must work together in the future of work

In this era of AI, Shah tells UNLEASH that organizations need to think about their workforce in terms of pyramids.

One is a pyramid of humans, and one is a pyramid of agents – this will be the future operating model.

Never before have organizations had to ability to do that.

What these two pyramids mean is that there are “a bunch of skills that are sitting in the agentic pyramid, and a bunch of skills that are sitting in the human pyramid”.

Because, for the first time ever, “now we have the ability to have AI agents heavy lift” some tasks from people, “which essentially means that people are freed up to do a lot more of the things that are more value adding”.

According to Shah, this means the humans become “deep specialists”, and their skills and expertise become the “fundamental differentiator” for an enterprise, versus its competitors.

For Shah, this is where skills truly become the currency of work, and a “source of competitive advantage”.

Everyone has access to AI – it is highly democratized – so “who I have in my organization, versus who you have, is going to actually make the difference”, continues Shah.

As a result, “lots of things will need to change in how we reward people, how we promote people” etc. “It’s just the beginning,” according to Shah.

Shah’s top tip to organizations grappling with his AI reality is to think of AI agents as skill blocks, not as pieces of software.

When doing workforce redesign, “how do you reorganize those skill blocks, alongside the [human] skill sets that are in your organization already?”.

For Shah this is where HR leaders have a pivotal in redefining the world of work.

With all these headlines about the merger of IT & HR from the likes of Moderna and Nvidia, what that story is really saying is that “agents and human beings are working together to underpin the majority of the skills”. “Getting that piece right now is particularly important”.

The Workday environment is really helping PwC get clear on the skills in the agentic and the human pyramids.

The beauty then is that you don’t just need to work with one vendor on agents, you can manage all the different AI agents you need in one place.