NOMINATION HIGHLIGHTS

The Global Tech AI Engineering Team, led by Partner Joe Harrington, is a global team of about 80 AI Engineers, Data Scientists, full stack developers, UI developers, tester, and product managers who have delivered transformative products at scale across a global network of Firms at PwC, while also innovating and publishing patents for the next wave of cutting edge AI services and solutions.

To democratize general purpose chat and the ability to use the latest frontier AI models, the team built and maintains ChatPwC, which is live in over 120 territories and close to 330,000 employees. New model releases by major frontier labs and cloud providers are released in under 24 hours globally, with in-region inference, for end users to experiment with and use. ChatPwC won a Foundry CIO100 award for AI innovation, the first such recognition ever in the Firm’s history.

Supporting the backend infrastructure is the Shared Services reverse proxy gateway, handling over half a billion API calls per month and close to 5 trillion tokens per month on a global basis. Model endpoints are provided via this gateway, and central governance and compliance is maintained while not sacrificing speed. There are over 170 models live in production, and the team is expanding to include MCP servers, skills, and agents.

The team is also hard at work building a two-step model router which will recommend not only the model but the surface on which the model should be hosted (local vs. cloud) in order to optimize performance and speed against cost. Further, prompt compression and cache optimization techniques are being delivered in order to further reduce spend for systems already in production.

And finally, for inventorship and novelty, individual team members were awarded patents in areas such as knowledge graph and representation of data in accounting, methods for an AI-assisted virtual assistant and consultant, and enhancing vector based retrieval augmented generation with contextual knowledge graph construction. This team is the tip of the spear for AI in tech at PwC, and builds/validates early prototypes of ideas that will change the industries that PwC serves with solutions and services proven to work.