KPMG India, Vianai Systems sign pact for AI-based conversational finance

KPMG in India on Wednesday said it has formed an alliance with human-centred AI platform and products firm Vianai Systems for AI-based conversational finance to help finance professionals.

The joint offering will leverage Vianai's hila Enterprise fine-tuning and optimisation capabilities with enterprise systems of record, according to a statement.

Targeting finance professionals, conversational finance will allow finance users to ask any question against their systems of record, internal documents, public data, and other data in natural language, with a view to get immediate responses by way of text, dashboards, charts and more, it added.

At present, the adoption of AI and the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) in enterprises has largely been a non-starter for business users that require an extremely high degree of accuracy and reliability, in particular those in finance roles.

Issues of LLM hallucinations and inaccuracies are too risky for business-critical functions, such as finance to adopt AI, it said.

As a result, finance teams have not been able to take advantage of the latest AI advancements, and instead, many still rely heavily on IT, analysts, visualisation tools, experts, and others to find answers to their questions, as per the statement.

"Delivering the power of AI into the hands of finance users is a foundational step toward making AI available to all business-critical functions. Finance departments and teams must have transparency in their work, and deliver transparency to the outside world - with speed," said Sanjay Rajagopalan, Chief Design and Strategy Officer at Vianai Systems.

The alliance would see both KPMG in India and Vianai Systems leveraging their respective expertise and resources together to provide this innovative conversational finance offering to enterprises looking to transform their finance function, it stated.

"Leveraging the power of LLMs with internal data sources, transaction systems, documents, and other data, as well as public information, would allow enterprises to paint a transparent and accurate picture of their business and industry.

"These LLMs can also help finance functions play a critical role in ensuring resilience towards a challenging risk and regulatory environment," said Sachin Arora, Partner and Head, KPMG Lighthouse (Analytics, AI and Data), KPMG in India.