EY Global Chairman and CEO Carmine Di Sibio and King Charles III stan showed up on Squawk on the Street today talking about the labor market and, more notably, how the firm is using an AI chatbot to answer payroll questions. The AI segment begins around 3:05.
He also discussed hiring, saying they’ve been seeing a slowdown in hiring across the board (he means outside of the firm), “particularly in professional services” (so, in the firm). He then talks about how consulting firms, including EY, have begun pushing back new hire start dates due to the state of the economy. “It really has nothing to do with ChatGPT…YET,” he said. “It has to do with the fact that many companies were hiring based on attrition rates that were much higher a year ago, a year and a half ago post-Covid, you know, people were leaving, The Great Resignation. Those attrition rates, for example for ourselves, went from 20, over 20 percent, down to 12, pretty suddenly.” This tracks with everything we’ve been hearing surrounding layoffs and layoffs-that-aren’t-layoffs (a.k.a. Death by PIP), firms are seeing much lower attrition rates than they budgeted for AND a slowdown in client demand, leading to cuts.
“So therefore a lot of companies, including ourselves, have found ourselves with more people than we need at this point in time,” he continued.
Foreshadowing more layoffs?
Above text was transcribed by a human with rickety hands, please forgive any errors. Just watch the video.
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