Despite hiring thousands of new graduates to satisfy growing demands, consulting businesses have to lay off hundreds of employees. One of the largest firms in the sector, Deloitte LLP, is looking to artificial intelligence (AI) for a solution.

According to a Bloomberg story, Deloitte is utilizing artificial intelligence to assess the skills of its current employees and design methods to relocate people from less busy sectors to more in-demand jobs. This is part of the firm's bigger goal to use technology to limit the hiring rate over time.

Deloitte hired 130,000 new employees this year. However, amid this hiring frenzy, the company had to notify thousands of its employees in the United States and the United Kingdom that their jobs would be made redundant due to a restructuring of some business divisions in reaction to a reduction in demand.

"It is a great goal to be able to avoid large swings of hirings and layoffs," said Stevan Rolls, global chief personnel officer at Deloitte. You can always be more efficient and successful in your search for the appropriate personnel."

Deloitte and other professional services firms have begun to use generative AI, which was made possible by the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT, to eliminate repetitive and time-consuming tasks that were previously assigned to junior staff, such as preparing documents for internal meetings or collecting large amounts of data for client presentations. These companies hope that their latest projects will help them better manage the thousands of additional staff they hire each year.

Deloitte's overall employment is approaching 460,000 following this year's hiring frenzy. This is three times the amount of new hires from a decade ago when income was around half of what it is now. Rolls continued, "Imagine Deloitte was so successful that we doubled our size again; I'd be very concerned about hiring a quarter-million people a year." It may not be less, but it may be the same as we currently hire."