PwC works with uman to optimise existing knowledge, benefiting our people and clients

At PwC, we recognise that staying ahead means not just advising on the future, but actively shaping it. That’s why we’re embracing AI solutions like uman to transform how we work and deliver value to our clients. We aim to be ‘client zero’, integrating AI into everything we do to set a powerful example for our clients. Our goal is to lead by example, fully understanding AI’s potential and challenges so we can help our clients navigate and implement the best technologies for their needs.

PwC reached out to software Scale-up uman having recognised the value the company's AI expert’s solution could add to our day-to-day work and that of our clients. Its AI agent understands and structures a firm’s data from Teams, SharePoint, Drive and customer relationship management (CRM) platforms to make it more easily available. Explains Sven Degroote, CTO and co-founder of uman, “At uman, it's our mission to make it super easy to share knowledge. Typically, we see that companies are struggling with reusing the information they have. It’s usually locked away in repositories like SharePoint sites, Google Drives and so on and it's very labour intensive to unlock it. What we effectively do with uman is to enable consultants and commercial teams to find that knowledge more easily with an AI-powered search experience.”

He adds, “reusing knowledge is crucial to a value proposition. You need to build up credibility by calling on cases you’ve done in the past. You need to know your value propositions from your offerings. This information is typically already documented somewhere.” And that’s exactly what our teams at PwC are doing. “Specifically, within our Consulting business, we’re mainly using uman’s AI-powered search engine solution to optimise and streamline our proposal process and make better use of the knowledge we have within our firm. Given that at PwC we have a broad range of service offerings, we need to make better use of the expertise and materials we have that’s often spread across multiple drives,” says Jean-Christophe Dermaut, Senior Associate, PwC.

As to the benefits of such an approach, Jean-Christophe Dermaut enthuses, “the value we see at PwC is actually threefold. It focuses not only on our people, but also the company and our clients. For our people, it reduces a lot of frustration. We all know the feeling of how hard it is to find back that right document, that particular case study, that specific reference case or whatever. By using uman, we're able to retrieve and find back the right information using a very visual interface. This brings a big advantage for our clients because we're not constantly reinventing the wheel but making the best use of the information we have to hand, so we’re always delivering quality as a firm.” 

Looking at a very specific use of uman’s AI-powered search solution, Jean-Christophe Dermaut notes that, “there's also a big benefit in terms of onboarding new people. It can be daunting joining such a big firm with everything you need to know. Uman helps new people retrieve the right information faster to be better equipped to take on projects more quickly and make better use of our resources we have.”

Right now, we’re using uman’s AI search tool, but this is just the beginning. We’re excited about exploring other uman tools, like its sales assistant, to support content creation and more. Says Jean-Christophe Dermaut, “as we grow, we see uman’s solutions becoming even more integrated into our daily workflows. Together, we’ll continue to innovate and find new ways to make our processes smarter and more efficient, tackling new challenges to create even better solutions for our teams and the industry.”