EY puts ecosystems at the heart of its data and AI strategy

EY Global Data & AI Summit 2022 was a good opportunity for HFS Research to listen to clients, meet EY leaders, and query ecosystem partners. EY showcased its flagship Data & AI use cases with passion; the Spanish weather and culture probably contributed to that, but one idea kept flashing into audience members’ minds: ecosystems.

Looking at data as an “ecosystem builder” that can open a whole range of new opportunities for organizations is something many EY leaders alluded to during the summit. EY seems to firmly believe that collaborating with partners is necessary for helping its customers leverage the power of data to ultimately unlock new sources of value. This belief is a good example of our emerging OneEcosystem™ mindset in action in Exhibit 1. This is a welcome development for enterprise clients looking to work with a Big Four that understands the importance and value of ecosystems.

Exhibit 1: The evolution from OneOffice to OneEcosystem™ adds a new dimension of partner experience to employee experience and customer experience

Source: HFS Research, 2022

EY believes that coopetition between partners will serve customers better

Greg Sarafin, EY Global Alliance and Ecosystem Leader, hosted a session on the importance of ecosystems with a panel featuring data and AI technology partners. We heard stories about how EY and its partners help their customers get value from a data lakehouse (open architecture combining the best elements of data lakes and data warehouses), change the way data-driven applications are built, and embed contextual decision intelligence engines into process workflows. It is a refreshing change from the habitual focus on data assurance and governance.

Competition between partners is not an issue for EY. On the contrary, its view is that coopetition boosts ecosystems as competitors capitalize on relationships to better serve their customers and, more importantly, anticipate their needs. Undoubtedly, EY’s key value proposition remains the depth of its client relationships, but partners now play an essential role in delivering exceptional services across the entire customer lifecycle.

Purpose beyond profit is what really fosters ecosystems

Stakeholder value is more important than shareholder value, and creating a value identity is increasingly critical in today’s war for talent. Organizations want to partner with other organizations with a purpose beyond profit, whether aligned with sustainability, diversity, or other purposes.

EY has shown that it is living its purpose of “building a better working world.” A clear example is the EY Open Science Data Challenge, a global initiative aimed at leveraging data and AI to solve some of the world’s most pressing issues, such as wildfires, crop identification and forecasting, and tracking biodiversity. The EY Space Tech Lab is also a good example of how EY uses Space Tech to transform how organizations monitor, measure, and report ESG metrics.

The fact that EY was one of the very first of the Big Four to align its strategy, operations, and performance metrics to a stated and visible purpose beyond profit might give the firm a clear advantage when it comes to attracting more and more like-minded purpose-led partners.

EY is venturing beyond the walls of its traditional core business

Many of the data transformation use cases presented during the summit focused on the traditional Big Four domain expertise, with a focus on regulatory and compliance requirements, such as an end-to-end transformation architecture program for a multinational insurance company.

We have also noticed that EY, with the help of its data and AI technology partners, is venturing into unchartered territory by providing data-driven services to solve real and complex operational challenges. We heard an interesting use case of how EY and its partners are helping a leading global mining company use artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyze commercial satellite imagery and data to solve real complex problems, such as remotely monitoring assets.

The Bottom Line: EY is committed to leveraging the power of data and its partner ecosystem to better serve its customers, but it must now take it to the next level to truly make a lasting impact.

EY firmly believes in the importance of collaborating with partners that share the common objective to better anticipate the needs of their customers. EY has current use cases to prove that it gets it and is doing it right. But now that data is changing the world, EY must deepen its engagements with partners and double down on its efforts to drive more large-scale initiatives to truly change the world with data and AI.