With increasing demand for real-time, actionable market intelligence, EY teams wanted to find a way to deliver more immediate, broad insights to clients.
Using Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, the EY Global Innovation team created EY Competitive Edge, an AI-powered strategic intelligence platform.
EY Competitive Edge facilitates sector-specific data querying and rapid, highly relevant intelligence to help clients make business-critical decisions.
Platform used by 5,000+ EY clients across the globe
To help clients realize long-term value for all stakeholders, EY teams offer professional services backed by precise data, intelligence, and security that promote critical connections across services, divisions, partnerships, and ecosystems. Member firms of EY teams consist of 400,000 professionals in more than 150 countries and geographies and serve clients in every industry. These firms provide insights across assurance, auditing, technology and security risk, enterprise risk management, transaction support, mergers and acquisitions, actuarial, and real estate advisory.
“We align with our clients’ strategies, providing solutions that help them make the right connections and decisions for growth, expansion, and transformation,” says Tony Qui, EY Global Chief Innovation Officer, Strategy and Transactions. “This helps them assure credibility and create exceptional experiences.”
With business landscapes becoming increasingly complex, EY leadership saw a growing need to support clients in navigating multiple layers of data to gain real-time, actionable market intelligence. A comprehensive, generative AI platform was envisioned to provide digitized EY offerings across three key solution areas—strategy, transaction, and transformation—to support confident and agile decision-making.
“We needed to be able to handle large-scale data processing, improve security, and provide a seamless user experience for our EY teams,” explains Priyam Lahiri, Director, Strategy and Transactions, Ernst & Young LLP. “With its leadership in language model innovation with Azure OpenAI Service, Microsoft was a great collaborator.”
Using Azure OpenAI Service as the foundation, the EY team created Competitive Edge, an AI-powered strategic intelligence platform that integrates EY proprietary intellectual property with a vast array of internal and external data sources. Azure OpenAI Service helps generate real-time, tailored insights on markets, companies, and sectors from more than 26 million company profiles, 2.1 million transactions, and over 325,000 company reports. The platform also monitors 677 million news articles in real time.
“We used Azure OpenAI Service for its robust AI capabilities, which helped us build and deploy different AI models efficiently and securely.”
Tony Qui, Global Chief Innovation Officer, Strategy and Transactions, EY
“We used Azure OpenAI Service for its robust AI capabilities, which helped us build and deploy different AI models efficiently and securely,” says Qui. It helped the EY teams to customize AI models for specific needs, incorporate multiple models for complex tasks, and facilitate scalability and performance. Qui adds that Azure OpenAI Service also provides robust security and governance features, crucial for managing sensitive data and compliance. “The ease of integration with other Azure services provided a seamless development experience,” he explains.
Azure AI Search was used to support querying across multiple data sources, enhancing EY Competitive Edge’s ability to deliver precise solutions tailored to strategic needs. “Azure AI Search is really good if you have data stored in multiple places and you want to index over those data in one solution,” says Lahiri. Azure AI Search, working with Azure OpenAI Service, enhances data harmonization and helps power sector-specific data querying, leading to rapid and highly relevant insights across the key solution areas. Its language models understand and generate human-like text that makes data interaction intuitive.
EY teams were able to distribute data across multiple nodes with Azure Cosmos DB, making it easier for EY Competitive Edge to handle large volumes of data and speed throughput. With Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB, data could be tokenized and vectorized, supporting efficient query processing and accurate information retrieval. “This helped us significantly reduce response times for complex queries, even when scanning millions of records and several terabytes of data,” says Qui.
Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Databricks, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), and Azure DevOps support the platform in managing and analyzing the large volumes of data quickly and with a high level of security, delivering the real-time insights that EY clients needed for strategic decisions.
“Azure Databricks is our workbench for managing models, writing code, and transforming data.”
Tony Qui, Global Chief Innovation Officer, Strategy and Transactions, EY
“Azure Databricks is our workbench for managing models, writing code, and transforming data,” says Qui. “AKS manages and orchestrates containerized solutions, enhancing scalability, performance, and security, which is crucial to the dynamic nature of data and AI workloads and securing highly confidential merger and acquisition projects.”
Launched in October 2024, EY Competitive Edge is already used by more than 5,000 EY clients across the globe. Embedding this platform deep into the company’s own workflows supports EY professionals with curated AI tools, helping them provide highly personalized service for thousands of clients.
“With sector-specific data querying, our clients and analysts gain rapid, highly relevant intelligence that brings precise and predictive experiences,” says Lahiri. “This drives faster analysis, workflow efficiency, and saves costs throughout our clients’ transformation journeys.”
“With Microsoft and AI, we’re helping businesses gain deeper insights faster, driving innovation and growth,” concludes Qui. “Together, we’ll continue to evolve EY Competitive Edge in scale, performance, and security, supporting end-to-end strategic outcomes for our clients as they evolve too.”
Discover more about EY on Facebook, LinkedIn, X/Twitter, and YouTube.
Follow Microsoft