EY Canada poured 400,000 hours into employee training last year as the firm prepares its workforce to adopt artificial intelligence. Now, the Big Four firm is focused on persuading those still wary of the technology that AI belongs in their day-to-day work, says its chief technology officer.

The British accounting and consulting firm has identified workers with both low skills and “low will” to adopt AI, and is rethinking how it presents the technology to those groups to “ensure our people remain energized and not overwhelmed,” Biren Agnihotri said in an interview.

About 75 per cent of the firm’s professionals in Canada have “achieved AI literacy” after it launched a $12 million internal training program in 2022. But Agnihotri said EY is developing “bespoke learning” after some workers came forward saying they were so overwhelmed they didn’t know where to start. 

The issue, which Agnihotri described as hitting “AI fatigue,” is an increasingly common sentiment as new AI tools inundate the corporate world. Boston Consulting Group has called it the “silicon ceiling.” Its survey of 10,600 leaders, managers and frontline white-collar employees across 11 countries found that regular AI adoption has stalled around 51 per cent amid lack of adequate training on the technology, particularly a lack of in-person exposure.

At a November conference on AI adoption hosted by Calgary legaltech firm Goodlawyer, professionals expressed similar sentiments. Wordsmith AI CEO Ross McNairn said on a panel that his company has tried to approach AI training more personally and “empathetically” after sensing that legal professionals were emotionally disengaging from the fever-pitch noise around AI. 

“Every legal team is just being hammered from all directions” by well-capitalized AI startups pitching new products, McNairn said. 

Pressure to learn AI skills has added a new intensity to an industry where 60 and 70 hour-weeks are already not unheard of. KPMG workers are now assessed on their AI usage in their annual performance reviews. Candidates may need to pass an AI test to even interview at McKinsey, according to companies that help aspiring consultants land jobs. ​​Dario Amodei, the CEO of AI juggernaut Anthropic, has warned that half of all entry-level white-collar jobs could be eliminated with AI. 

EY, which has nearly 9,000 workers in Canada, has taken steps to keep workers onside. The company has workers correspond with an AI-powered “thought partner” chatbot that tells them how AI will be changing their job. 

Agnihotri said that highly skilled workers who show strong motivation to use AI (what he calls “high skill, high will”) are already serving as “evangelists” within the organization. But the firm’s analysis of the uptake of AI training modules showed some workers were “very skeptical,” requiring a different learning approach. These workers receive extra guidance on ethical AI use, handling ambiguous chatbot responses, and are encouraged to experiment on “sandbox” platforms where they can safely learn from failures. 

The strategy is an acknowledgement, Agnihotri said, that even highly trained consultants and accountants have had to quickly pick up analytics tools, deep learning, generative AI and now agentic AI in a matter of a few years. As the firm rolls out its internal AI training, it’s monitoring the same trends in client workplaces. A global EY survey that included employees at 50 Canadian workplaces found that 43 per cent of the Canadian employees were worried about overreliance on AI.

Still, Agnihotri pushed back on the idea that AI adoption will replace entry level consultants. The firm tries to test its own tech recommendations as “client zero” before they go out to clients, particularly with newer more “fragile” tools like agentic AI that require well-trained humans remain “in the loop” to enforce responsible AI usage. Agnihotri said he’s still looking to source entry-level talent from business and engineering schools within Canada. 

AI is “a common responsibility for everyone, whether you are a CEO or you are an intern. This is an evolution which is happening at the organization, at the industry and at the country level as well.”