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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.”
The benefits of these tools are vast and exciting, Andrea says, such as internal chatbots that can answer questions about reports, find information or even book your annual leave. “It takes a lot of mundane work off people’s hands, which means your time is freed up, but the big leap forward is when you can use it like a thought partner,” Andrea explains.
“If you learn to use these tools correctly, you can get a similar benefit to another colleague supporting you. You can feed a document into the AI and tell it, ‘I’m sharing this with the CEO. What questions might they ask about this document?’ That, to me, is next level, and where it will make life a lot easier.”
“With technology generally, but with generative AI specifically, standing still is going backwards, so you need to really push ahead. There’s a phrase that we have, and this applies to businesses as well as to individuals – AI won’t take your job, but somebody who knows how to use AI will. Another business will eat your clients and eat your business, if they know how to take the skills you already have and match that up with AI. Technology moves so fast, so you always need people in the middle who are that bridge between business and technology.”
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Photography: Kieran Harnett
