EY launches AI accelerators to help fuse AI tech with organizational ambitions
EY’s suite of strategic accelerators for building AI-native enterprises, EY.ai Value Blueprints, can help companies fuse their technological and human capabilities into better strategies for fitting AI into existing infrastructures. We spoke with Menno Bonninga, Partner at EY, on the new AI offering and how it adds value to clients embracing AI.
Companies in a wide range of industries have faced a series of hurdles in the race to adopt AI. While many organizations are attempting to add AI to their existing structures, research from EY shows that 87% of senior leaders encounter major obstacles when trying to implement these technologies.
According to Bonninga, the traditional approach of slowly layering new tools onto old systems is no longer enough to stay competitive. “Every enterprise leader knows AI will reshape their industry. Most are pursuing the safer path of incremental adoption.”
“But the window for competitive advantage is closing. Organizations that continue to incrementally layer AI onto legacy structures will find themselves outmanoeuvred by competitors who rebuild from the foundation. The question is not whether to transform, it’s whether to renovate or rebuild.”
The real goal should instead be to build an AI-native organization from the ground up. This means creating a foundation where autonomous systems are fully integrated from the very start rather than being added on the process as an afterthought. That sort of retrofitting can often lead to problems down the line.
A new strategy for growth
To address these challenges, EY has launched EY.ai Value Blueprints. This suite of solutions acts as a roadmap for companies to move beyond simple automation. Bonninga explains that many businesses have fallen into the habit of simply ‘bolting on’ AI to different departments like finance or marketing, rather than adopting tools across the entire organization with a more holistic approach.
“As a result, executives find themselves stuck in their AI journey where they first started without a unified plan, facing missed opportunities, diminishing returns, and unrealized potential,” explains Bonninga.
“Instead, the winners emerging from this investment wave share a common characteristic: They’re doing different things: not just doing things differently.”
When AI is built into the core architecture of a process, it unlocks entirely new business models. This strategy allows for data-driven decisions to be made more quickly and supports growth that can last over the long term.
Nuts and bolts of an AI transformation
With the EY.ai Value Blueprints, agentic enterprises are built in various layers that create a complete architecture for more intelligent operations. These layers include the customer experience, the workforce, and the processes themselves.
“Redefining roles and responsibilities of human experts requires upskilling initiatives to enable more effective collaboration with AI agents,” Bonninga says.
“Human experts focus on interpreting complex outputs and handling strategic decisions that require the judgment, creativity, and contextual understanding that only people can provide. Process redesign can eliminate manual handoffs, create continuous flows that leverage AI’s 24/7 capabilities, and shift focus to transformation rather than mere automation.”
Other critical layers are trust and intelligence. By putting in place new governance frameworks that maintain appropriate oversight while enabling AI autonomy, companies can embed security and ethical guardrails directly into their code.
“Organizations need frameworks that establish clear boundaries for different levels of AI decision-making, implement real-time monitoring systems that track AI performance patterns, and create escalation protocols that bring humans into the loop for strategic decisions while also maintaining accountable for all outcomes,” states Bonninga.
It is important that organizations build a unified base of memory and knowledge that can enable reasoning in the context of the enterprise and the individual members of teams.
“This is the ‘brain’ or, in other words, what the enterprise knows and how it makes decisions through analytics and advanced AI,” notes Bonninga.
Delivering real results
The impact of this architectural shift is already visible in several sectors. EY gives the example of a global healthcare client that recently used these blueprints to redesign its order processing.
“A single, streamlined interface powered by automation and smart orchestration reduced manual work, supported smooth order processing, and gave customers easy self-service and quicker responses,” explains Bonninga.
“These changes resulted in improved customer engagement, increased satisfaction and loyalty, stronger revenue protection, and more available working capital. Automating routine tasks also allowed employees to focus on higher-value work.”
Leaders who choose to rebuild their foundations with AI as a primary principle are positioned to redefine their place in the market. Ultimately, it is a question of simply renovating or rebuilding from the ground up. To that end, EY.ai Value Blueprints are aimed at leaders that want to make the harder, bolder choice to fully reinvent their organizations with AI as the architectural principle, to move organizations from being AI-enabled to AI-native.
