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‘AI won’t take your job, but somebody who knows how to use AI will’: using AI to maximise your potential at work
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Andrea Paolella, Digital Transformation Director at PwC Ireland, has always made people a priority in her varied career. Her latest challenge is introducing generative AI into the workplace in a way that uses the technology to maximise people’s potential
When Andrea Paolella joined PwC, she wasn’t sure what her career would look like, but she has found her own evolving path through the organisation. “I studied business and law in UCD, and I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to focus on, which is why I ended up choosing tax in PwC, because it allowed me to use both sides of my discipline,” she explains. Initially working on the private client tax team, she realised she was drawn to working with people, and became involved in the tax graduate recruitment programme.
Because of her passion in this area, Andrea managed to create a new direction for herself. “I don’t know where I got the confidence to do this,” she laughs, “but I was leading the graduate recruitment work for our tax team as a side project, and I realised there was a real opportunity for us to change our approach. So, I went to the head of tax, and I told him that I thought we could increase our impact in this space, there was a lot more we could do, and I had a plan as to how we might do it. I asked him to give me a full-time role driving graduate recruitment for tax. And to my everlasting surprise, he said yes. That was a real turning point in my career, because through that work I went from looking after graduate recruitment to then being involved in employee engagement right across the tax team.”
This move then led her to the technology space, introducing new technology for data and analytics to the tax team in Ireland. So when a firm-wide initiative around digital transformation was introduced, Andrea was moved into the team leading it. “The focus was bringing all of our people on this digital journey.”
The programme started in 2019, and its importance was underlined by the pandemic the following year. “We pivoted from in-person digital academies to online virtual academies literally overnight,” Andrea explains. “Over that time, the programme grew and evolved as new technologies came on board.”
And while her role now is ostensibly about technology, for Andrea, the focus is still very much on people. “There’s always new tech, and I get very excited about that, but I’m not a technologist. It’s much more about getting people to embrace these tools to enhance what they’re doing.”
Her current role is Digital Transformation Director, and recently, a lot of Andrea’s focus has been on the introduction of AI tools. “We realised very quickly that this was going to be absolutely game-changing for our business,” she says. “We had a huge shift towards looking at tools that leverage generative AI, and what that’s going to mean both for our people internally, but also for what we bring to our clients.”
