KPMG Australia has updated its generative AI technology KymChat to search across its quality and risk manual and independence policies.
The professional services firm unveiled Kymchat, a proprietary version of ChatGPT, for employees use back in March. It was developed in partnership with Microsoft.
The first use case of the digital assistant was to make team directories more easily searchable, for greater ease of locating colleagues.
KymChat is now also capable of searching the firm’s policies, leading to organisational efficiencies, according to KPMG chief digital officer John Munnelly.
Speaking at a Legal Innovation and Tech Fest in Sydney, Munnelly said the policies were uploaded to KymChat “a couple of weeks ago”.
“It is now searching our quality and risk manual and independence questions, and it is absolutely amazing," he said.
“You can ask it all things and everyone asks questions slightly differently, so rather than going through our independence team and going, ‘I'm not sure, can I get a loan from one of our audit clients who happens to be a bank?’ you can ask KymChat and KymChat gives you what is now a very, very good answer."
Munnelly also described the origins of KymChat, saying it was originally designed around a Microsoft AI service “about six months ago”.
This version of KymChat never saw the light of day. The service was then revamped when Microsoft shared with KPMG its planned Open AI capability support.
Munnelly said KPMG initially blocked use of ChatGPT generally, over concerns about what data might be entered into it, and where it would be processed or stored.
It then allowed some carefully managed experimentation, before launching its own version of the chatbot as KymChat.
He said there are “no sovereignty issues” as data uploaded to KymChat “stays in Australia”.
Elements of queries are processed on overseas infrastructure, but Munnelly said the company is confident in the architecture and security of the arrangement, which runs over Microsoft infrastructure.
“We still track everything that people put in there, but that's more about learning the questions they're asking," he said.
He added that KymChat had cost "$753 to run last week and it answered 25,000 questions."
KPMG plans to continue expanding what KymChat can search over time, based on the results it had seen so far.
