EY is putting $100 million behind "human skills".
Why do professional firms call themselves practices?
The word is centuries old. It comes from putting knowledge into action AND, importantly, from the repeated doing through which skill is acquired. A practitioner was someone who learned through practice.
Which raises an interesting question for the AI era:
What happens to practice when AI does the practicing? EY is putting $100 million behind part of the answer.
This fiscal year, EY US is rewarding employees for adaptability, judgment, innovation, business acumen and experimentation with AI. Awards range from $500 spot bonuses to $10,000–$25,000 for larger individual or team contributions, with no overall cap.
And EY isn't alone. KPMG is reshaping early-career training around critical thinking and judgment. PwC is combining AI skills with empathy and creativity. McKinsey & Company has shifted a growing share of fees toward outcomes, while Accenture is reorganizing around “Reinvention Services” and larger, multi-service engagements.
The economics of knowledge work are changing.
AI makes execution cheaper and more abundant. The value of knowledge work is moving toward the problems that require context, judgment and accountability.
That's a huge opportunity. But it creates a talent question that goes well beyond consulting.
I started my career in audit and tax. You developed judgment by doing the work: tracing a variance, checking the source document, reconciling a discrepancy, encountering an exception, writing the memo.
The doing often felt like drudgery, but it is also how I learned to think.
The work was the training. And this is true across knowledge work.
If production and learning have historically been bundled together, what happens when we automate the production? If the machine does the reps, where do the next generation get their practice?
That's the challenge: not how to preserve the old way of working, but how to preserve the learning that was hidden inside it.
And that may be one of the most consequential talent questions of the next decade.
Until next time,
Ram
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Ram Srinivasan
MIT Alum | Author, The Conscious Machine | Global Future of Work and AI Adoption Leader published in Business Insider, Fortune, Harvard Business Review, MIT Executive Viewpoints and more.
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Ram Srinivasan currently serves as an Innovation Strategist and Transformation Leader, authoring groundbreaking works including "The Conscious Machine" and the upcoming "The Substrate Shift."
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