How ecosystems can help navigate complex international payroll operations

Learn how the EY-Microsoft Alliance leverages AI to simplify global payroll employee experiences, ensure compliance and enhance operations.

In brief

• The EY-Microsoft Alliance creates solutions for EY teams to leverage in their solutions and they have done that for payroll.
• Learn how an AI-assisted payroll chatbot can solve significant global business challenges.
• This approach simplifies workloads and enhances the employee experience.

Global corporations managing international payroll face complex challenges due to constantly changing political, legal, social and economic factors. These changes affect regulatory requirements and reporting, making it difficult to navigate mismatched labor laws, tax regulations, data privacy standards and payment procedures.

The resulting dynamic conditions increase employee inquiries, complicating payroll management. Companies need efficient, accurate and cost-effective methods to address these inquiries, which helps to enhance employee satisfaction and trust.

Painless global payroll is possible

Payroll errors and delayed responses can lead to fines, damage organizational reputation and frustrate employees, affecting costs and related functions like recruitment and retention. Preventing errors is crucial.

Traditional methods for handling these challenges are often costly and ineffective. Businesses are ready for an innovation: a solution that offers something greater than the sum of its parts. But finding a time-efficient, cost-effective, innovative and globally adaptable solution that can grow with your organization demands taking stock of your entire system and adding something more: an ecosystem approach.

Decoding ecosystems for exponential value-added benefits

Just like organizations, all ecosystems are unique. They emerge out of specific sets of client needs and circumstances, so there are no carbon copies. Every ecosystem requires its own combination of capabilities, collaborators, data and technology in response to one-of-a-kind organizational concerns or goals.

EY-orchestrated ecosystems blend specific strengths and functions. They are comprised of the client itself, existing vendors and their frameworks, systems and technologies and industry-leading collaborators like Microsoft.

Ecosystems help accelerate the transformation and maximization of value for organizations far beyond the status quo, particularly in tax where change is intensifying.

When applied correctly, the value a high-performing, well-orchestrated ecosystem provides to its clients is exponential. Revenue growth, for example, more than doubled in organizations that leveraged high-performing ecosystems compared to those that didn’t, and those same entities witnessed 1.5x more cost reductions.

Leveraging technology to overcome AI challenges

Businesses today face significant challenges because of AI, but with the challenges come possibilities that can open doors to unexplored opportunities.

The key to making the most of AI is having the right technology in place and applying it with the right approach. Without the right technology at the core of your operations, you’re already losing ground in a global market that’s more competitive than ever. And when it comes to compliance and reporting, the change is constant.

Plus, having the right technology in place helps you keep up while avoiding the penalties that come with noncompliance.

The EY-Microsoft Alliance provides unique insights to the road-mapping of the enterprise-wide technology impacting most of our clients who utilize Microsoft products. Because Microsoft’s technology is central to all the platforms we build at EY, clients can seamlessly integrate their side of the data and tech puzzle. This unlocks greater efficiency and deeper insights from the solutions we are building.

Case study: Delivering targeted payroll solutions through strategic collaboration

Many clients have come to EY with this challenge and have asked the EY Payroll Operate services to help with a solution. One specific client needed a quick and accurate communication platform with their employees that will answer country- and employee-specific payroll questions within a broader global payroll operations and service development environment. Employee satisfaction and their company’s reputation hung in the balance, and they sought a solution that could resolve their issue while deepening trust.

Weighing the client’s desired outcomes and their challenges, the EY team connected with Microsoft as a core part of an ecosystem approach to solving the client’s complex problems. This collaboration efficiently combined Microsoft’s foundational technology with EY teams’ experienced regulatory content acumen.

Payroll payday: simplified workload, serious results

In this case, the team built a proof of concept following a payroll business pilot. The pilot program addressed employee payroll questions through a chatbot. It gave the client the right technology and offered accessible answers to employee questions easily and quickly.

The Microsoft Azure cloud enabled the development of a large language model, which helped the team create a payroll chatbot capable of answering complex employee questions.

The results brought this vision to life, solving their payroll needs in a way that was efficient for them as the employer, but also incredibly effective and beneficial for their employees.

After the pilot, the team scaled it to an enterprise-ready payroll chatbot that answers complex payroll questions by using an underlying large language model and vast compliance data from the EY global payroll regulatory library. This alliance-facilitated solution helped reduce the burden on the employer while personalizing the employee experience.

In very real terms, there were improvements across the board in answer accuracy, employee satisfaction and first call resolution. There was an overwhelming decrease in cost to serve.

This is just one example of how collaborations can help can accelerate and improve our client’s work while simplifying their workload.