Big Four consultants win at inaugural Australian AI Awards
PwC partner Tom Pagram has been named AI consultant of the year at the inaugural Australian AI Awards, with EY’s Michelle Zhao and Danielle Froes jointly winning the rising star award.
Hosted by Momentum Media, the awards were held for the first-time last week at a gala event in Sydney, with winners announced across more than two dozen individual and group categories covering a wide range of sectors.
Pagram, who heads artificial intelligence for PwC in Australia, claimed the consulting award in the enterprise category ahead of half a dozen finalists from EY, while KPMG took home the AI Innovator award for accountancy services.
Joining the firm in Brisbane in 2015 and now based out of Sydney, Pagram previously served as PwC’s assurance CTO prior to being tapped to head up AI in Australia in what has become an increasing strategic focus for the firm, both locally and at the international level. In addition to this role, Pagram also co-leads a global network of more than 40 ‘AI Factories’.
“It’s an absolute honour to receive this award, but more importantly there is a team of over 200 amazing people behind AI at PwC that this award recognises, not just me,” Pagram said in a speech on the night. “We’re big believers in the rich opportunities available for Australian businesses that adopt artificial intelligence, and we can feel the momentum building.”
Pagram was also one of ten finalists for ‘AI Leader of the Year’, alongside EY counterpart Lisa Bouari, with the title awarded to Seth Watts, co-founder of real estate fintech CampaignAgent. Aruna Kolluru of Dell Technologies meanwhile took the ‘Female Leader of the Year’ award, with Bouari and Accenture’s responsible AI & data lead Erin Scarrow among finalists.
Other awards
Together with Bouari, nine consultants and technicians from Ernst & Young made the finalist lists across categories, including Chris Sherley for software engineering and Nelton D’Souza in the researcher segment. Remarkably, the firm claimed six of ten nominations for ‘Consultant of the Year’, including Kenrick Setiobudi, Shveta Gupta, Gaurav Chauhan, and Emily Whitney.
The two remaining EY finalists in the category were Michelle Zhao and Danielle Froes, who were ultimately named joint ‘AI Rising Star of the Year’ winners in the enterprise bracket. A director in her second stint at EY, Zhao leads AI and GenAI adoption programs for APAC financial services clients from Melbourne, while Froes is an AI & Data senior manager based out of Sydney.
EY was also a company finalist in the AI Innovator categories for critical infrastructure and information technology (the latter alongside the likes of Mantel Group and Xaana.Ai among others), but among the Big Four it was KPMG which triumphed, taking home the gong for accountancy services ahead of PwC for its recently released internal generative AI tool KymTax.
“We are thrilled that KPMG Australia’s KymTax has been recognised with the coveted award,” stated Ben Travers, who was promoted to tax & legal national managing partner in a shuffle last year. “KymTax is our pioneering solution which is revolutionising how our tax specialists work, providing seamless access to our deep tax knowledge and streamlining the drafting of advice.”
