As part of their combined commitment to utilize the most advanced Azure OpenAI technologies in the tax and legal industry, EY announces a deepened strategic collaboration with Microsoft to develop EY Intelligent Payroll Chatbot as part of the Next Gen Payroll Platform.

By leveraging the Microsoft Cloud and Azure OpenAI Service – enhanced by the collective intelligence of EY payroll offerings – clients will soon be able to modernize payroll employee care; improve employee satisfaction; automate payroll administrator controls, checks, and workflow; and harness strategic insights to nurture the workforce of tomorrow.

The generative AI chatbot is expected to enhance both employee satisfaction (CSAT) and first-contact-resolution (FCR) key performance indictors (KPIs) by greater than 50%, assisted by an initial result of 93% correct first-time answer ratio, based on proof-of-concept (POC) findings.

Many organizations struggle with how to answer employee tier-1 questions effectively due to language, time-zones, payroll subject-matter complexity, and the volume of data needed to resolve queries. Traditional call centers, basic chatbots, language lines, and employee information portals have failed to improve the employee experience or reduce the human burden (including cost-to-serve) of high call-volumes related to payroll questions.

EY teams have built a LLM and generative AI chatbot POC using ChatGPT In Azure OpenAI service, to understand the “anatomy of an individual’s pay slip” and to link regulatory compliance elements with company policies – all to answer granular questions and generate highly personalized explanations for employees.

The EY Intelligent Payroll Chatbot will add to EY Employee Experience Mobile and Web Applications, which provides compliant pay slips, tax documents and insights to employees in over 159 countries, natively in 49 languages. EY teams will continue to work with Microsoft to build and deploy LLMs and new AI Tax applications to codify EY leading practices around Tax and payroll intelligence.

Marna Ricker, EY Global Vice Chair, Tax, says:

“EY Tax is committed to improving the client experience with advanced technologies and generative AI that allows for greater conversational capabilities and the ability to parse extremely large volumes of content faster leading to better outcomes for all stakeholders. The expected addition of EY Intelligent Payroll Chatbot on our Next Gen Payroll Platform will highlight our continuous innovation and collaboration, alongside Microsoft, to provide market-leading services.”

Sheri Sullivan, EY Global Payroll Operate Leader, says:

“The Global Payroll World has been waiting for technology that can easily connect the high volume of data elements in different languages and country-specific information to provide real-time visibility, controls, and insights with consumer-grade employee experience. The game changer is the alliance between EY and Microsoft, which combines Microsoft’s leading technology with EY’s regulatory compliance knowledge. With the combined power of ChatGPT In Azure OpenAI, EY “Smart Agent” and Microsoft VIVA, the future of one-touch payroll is right around the corner.”

To address the growing complexity of payroll data and international policies, EY teams will continue to work with Microsoft to develop solutions leveraging EY’s AI principles, responsible AI capabilities within Azure OpenAI and Azure Data technologies to enhance client payroll employee and administrator experiences with trust.