Innovation and AI
In an era of accelerated change, innovation turns challenge into opportunity.
Innovation, Everywhere
At BDO, innovation is more than a mindset; it’s a strategic priority where we aim to improve how we operate to deliver greater value for our clients and our people.
We promote ingenuity by unleashing the full potential of our professionals. We strive to create an environment – a culture – where people feel comfortable sharing their ideas and everyone can harness their inherent creativity and abilities to deliver exceptional results.
Curiosity is in our DNA. We embrace change and challenge the status quo to drive value, and often transform, how we interact with one another and serve our clients.
Together, we are shaping the future of our industry, one innovative idea at a time.
Innovation it's not just about innovating technology, but opening up opportunities for people to really develop their voice. BDO constantly strives to innovate and find new ways to inspire other people. Helping people grow, learn, network, collaborate. What's the best way to do it? Problem solving. How come This takes a lot of hours? Let me see if I can make this take less time. New ideas, new solutions. You get a little bit better every day. At the end of the year, you look back and go, wow, we got a lot better. It's just not one person doing this. There's a whole team of individuals working together. There's a lot of opportunity to offer your insights. It really comes down to who wants to participate. We're all here working together and it doesn't really matter what level you are. Everybody can learn from everyone. It's an all hands approach, understanding what the problem is, trying to solve the problem, and working together that can't be done by IT alone. It's the art of the possible that you look at and what you know, what you want to do and where you can take things that are aha moment, ideas, experimentation, critical thinking. It's how we go about doing it. Empowerment, over communicating, listening, taking risks. Constant collaboration. Collaboration, collaboration. Teamwork, integration. Moving forward together, you have everybody rowing in the same direction. That's where we really make progress, creating new, innovative ideas to help us get to the next level. It's just completely awesome.
Thriving Through Innovation
Purpose Driven, Human-Centered, Responsibly Built AI
We believe some of the most powerful ideas and solutions are ones that can be leveraged today to improve workflows, generate insights, and elevate teaming and collaboration. That is why our approach to AI centers on enhancing the capabilities and capacity of our professionals in a way that augments their day-to-day work experience, enhancing their productivity and unlocking their potential.
While we focus on giving our professionals practical solutions that provide immediate impact, we are also exploring bold, strategic moves that push the boundaries of what we can do for our people, our clients and our profession. Collaboration, curiosity, and responsible experimentation are critical to our approach. We aim to be the best by carefully laying the foundation for ideas that will build resilient businesses and improve the lives of all stakeholders.
As AI transforms service delivery within our profession, we remain committed to transparency, privacy, compliance, and ethics in AI usage.
People First
We pursue solutions that enhance human capabilities ― never supplanting them.
Everyday Innovation
We focus on practical use cases purpose-built to augment the day-to-day needs of the people using it.
Responsible Use
Our profession is built on trust. Our stakeholders must have confidence in the technology we’re using and our approach to using it.
Strategic Resilience
Our AI strategy intends to build a sustainable and resilient future that harmonizes people, purpose, and performance.
BDO’s Responsible AI Policy
BDO aims to foster trust and confidence among its stakeholders, safeguard security, and contribute to the positive impact of AI on its personnel, clients and communities.
BDO has adopted a Responsible AI Policy comprised of seven Responsible AI Principles aimed at emphasizing the ethical, governance and security safeguards that are vital for BDO to manage the risks and capture the benefits associated with the design and application of AI technologies.
Learn more about the Responsible AI Principles we have adopted:
Thriving With AI in Our Every Day
At BDO, we focus on practical AI use cases that help our professionals work smarter, faster, and more strategically. From tax delivery enhancements to better client service, discover a few of the proprietary AI solutions that drive efficiency across the firm and support our teams in their day-to-day work:
At BDO, helping people thrive isn't just our purpose, it's our promise. And today, we're harnessing innovation to help fulfill that promise. Innovation at BDO is more than a mindset. It's a strategic priority. We're integrating AI across our business to empower our people, enhance client service, and drive our profession forward. And now we're taking bold steps forward with Agentic AI, the newest generation of artificial intelligence that can make decisions, adapt, and collaborate to achieve business objectives, all while working in concert with human oversight to ensure alignment and accountability. AgenTeq AI isn't just automation, it's transformation. With over one billion dollars invested globally over five years and a dedicated research and AI development team, VDO is at the cutting edge, rapidly testing and deploying solutions that elevate our service delivery. One example is our consultative selling persona. The persona leverages multiple AI agents to give our professionals on demand access to deep company intelligence, industry trends, and market and regulatory activities in a comprehensive report. By anticipating client needs and connecting the dots to BDO's solutions and professionals, we strengthen relationships and reinforce BDO's role as a trusted advisor. Giving our teams instant access to business insights frees them to focus on what matters most our clients. Within the first year of implementation, BDO professionals initiated approximately thirty five thousand insights chats, unlocking new opportunities and helping clients address challenges faster and more strategically. By saving critical hours, even days, the BDO team has increased bandwidth to focus on ways to address the challenges our clients are facing daily. This is just one way BDO is driving innovation, providing advanced solutions that fuel growth, enhance operations, and add value to every client relationship. At BDO, we're not just embracing the future. We're building it so our people and clients can thrive every day.
Chat BDO is BDO's internal generative AI platform developed in collaboration with Microsoft. It’s designed to enhance productivity and innovation within the firm by providing a secure and customized version of ChatGPT tailored to BDO’s specific needs. Professionals are also able to create and interact with various agents designed to assist with BDO-related topics and processes.
With thousands of users, Chat BDO has transformed the way we work at BDO. Since its inception, it significantly optimized workflows, helping our professionals save more than 1 million hours of time, allowing for more time spent on strategic tasks and priorities.
"Chat BDO’s AI agents are like having quick access to expert helpers. They make it easy to handle processes and get insights that fit our needs. They’ve helped us get things done faster and better so we can focus on more important work."
–Joanna Weststrate, AI Change Strategy Lead
Initially an idea from BDO’s Marketing & Communications department, BDO’s Consultative Selling leverages multiple AI agents to give our professionals on-demand access to deep company intelligence, industry trends, and market and regulatory activities in a comprehensive report. With these immediate insights, BDO professionals save hours, even days, giving our teams more bandwidth to focus on ways to address the challenges our clients are facing daily.
Within the first year of implementation, BDO professionals initiated approximately 35,000 insights chats—unlocking new opportunities and helping clients address challenges faster and more strategically.
“Consultative Selling saves us critical time by gathering information so we can focus on ways BDO can address our clients’ challenges. This ensures we deliver a unified approach that includes strategic insights and financial solutions.”
–Mitzi Loveless, Business Development Director
BDO Tax UserVerse combines data, project management, scheduling, and analytics into one cohesive platform within Microsoft Dynamics 365. In addition to streamlining processes and enhancing efficiency, it enables BDO tax professionals to fully leverage Microsoft's AI within BDO’s core technologies.
With BDO Tax UserVerse, BDO’s tax professionals have access to:
- Cutting-edge tax tools, resources, and data analytics capabilities that unlock smarter analysis
- Real-time collaboration, tracking, and management of tax-related tasks across different teams and locations
- Enhanced insights and technology in a single, user-friendly interface
The result is an innovative platform that fortifies BDO’s market prominence. Within the first year of launching BDO Tax UserVerse, the time required to complete a tax workflow has reduced by 10-20%.
"BDO Tax UserVerse makes managing tax processes easier and keeps everything centralized. We can track tasks efficiently and work more effectively as a team, which helps us to deliver even better service to our clients."
–Esayas Messele, Tax Practice Leader
Technology is changing how we perform audits and the value we deliver. BDOADVANTAGE, our digital audit suite, integrates leading-edge technologies like predictive analytics, artificial intelligence, and robotic process automation to streamline the client experience and harness clients’ data in new ways.
Our analytics engines make it possible to perform rigorous data analysis on the most complex data sets to provide insights throughout the audit, resulting in a more thorough understanding of our clients’ businesses and a higher quality audit.
"Advances in technology are requiring more of the profession than ever before. Today’s audits demand synergy between skilled, curious professionals and advanced technologies, such as AI. By harnessing both, we can successfully address client challenges in this rapidly changing environment to power a seamless experience, without losing sight of what’s most important — maintaining audit quality."
–Tara Pendleton, Assurance Principal
Wired for Innovation: BDO’s AI Changemakers
Tune into our video series to learn all the ways BDO professionals are sparking AI transformation across the firm.
Welcome to Wired for Innovation, BDO's AI changemakers. I'm Nate Botman, your AI host. In this series, we shine a light on how BDO professionals are driving AI transformation across the firm. Today, I'm joined by Alyssa Reese, senior director of digital marketing at BDO, to talk about her role as an AI ambassador where she champions change, tests new tools, shares knowledge through peer led workshops and more. How does AI support your work and how do you help others adopt AI in their roles? It enhances my work. So whether it's a new idea or helping me polish my writing, I definitely feel more confident in the quality and clarity of my work. It gives me back time in my day. So the time I would have spent, you know, coming up with a new idea or editing something, I can now take that time back and focus on larger, more strategic projects. I think when people have that moment when it clicks for them is really exciting. So for me, I think the moment was applying it to my specific role and team. Can you tell us about your role as AI ambassador? I love being an AI ambassador. I was invited to be a part of this group. And what we get to do is pilot and test new agents or features before they're rolled out to the rest of the firm. So that's been really exciting. So being in marketing and communications, I get to meet with professionals in tax and assurance, advisory and other core business areas. And we all have similar problems and challenges that we're trying to solve. And then I think it's the early access. So getting to have early access to the different platforms really helps me be a better, you know, change management steward, if you will, to help get all those ideas across to marketing. How does the AI Ambassador program help accelerate AI adoption at BDO? So what I found is that we're a lot of us are using AI in different pockets in our various teams, but we might not necessarily be sharing those ideas with one another. So I think if we can bring teams and ideas together, we can have a much bigger impact. Over seven million messages have been sent with our AI platform by marketing and communication professionals since the tool launched in August of twenty twenty three. And that number is only increasing. So I'm excited for everybody to have that same moment to be able to feel like they're part of innovation, that they get time back in their day to be more collaborative, efficient, and just enjoy what they're doing both inside and outside of work. What is your advice for those exploring AI? Just try it. Just try it. Start somewhere. Start small. Open it up at the beginning of your day. You don't know yet how you're gonna use it. Ask it simple questions. Have a conversation. You don't have to think of the perfect prompt. Prompt writing is a skill, but you can also just have a conversation with it. Genuinely ask it what you need support with, and then have a conversation. Well, Alyssa, thank you for taking the time to share your perspective and giving us a behind the scenes look at just one of the ways change enablement is occurring at BDO. Stay tuned for more conversations with the change makers helping BDO professionals embrace AI to create everyday impact.
Awards and Recognitions
BDO stands out in the marketplace through a people-first approach to innovation that guides the practical integration of AI across our business. By building impactful applications, expanding our teams’ capabilities, and enhancing how we serve clients, we advance the profession. See how this momentum is translating into industry recognition and award-winning work.
How BDO’s AI Solutions Can Support Client Success
Spotlight: BDO’s Intelligent Virtual Assistant
As leaders seek to harness the power of Generative AI, BDO offers options that enhance productivity while safeguarding data. BDO’s Intelligent Virtual Assistant (IVA) supports a secure, customized ChatGPT environment hosted within a client’s Microsoft Azure environment. This setup helps provide control, mitigate data breach risk, and prevent data from being used to train external AI models. BDO IVA also works alongside Microsoft 365 Copilot, designed to improve productivity and optimize operations within familiar Microsoft applications. BDO's experience in implementing IVA and Copilot enhances your approach to secure AI integration, empowering your operations with AI-driven insights and automation.
"IVA has been a huge help for our clients by providing them with quick access to generative AI in a secure, user-friendly way."
–Sean Ahmadinejad, Principal - BDO Digital - Data & AI
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