Fireside Chat, Interview
Leading Through Complexity: EY’s Janet Truncale on Leadership, AI, and the Modern Boardroom
- EY's strategy, "shaping the future with confidence," positions the firm as a tech-led, tech-enabled partner for complex client transformations, utilizing a global scale of 400,000 people across 150+ countries to drive investment capacity and operational momentum.
- The firm plans to evolve service delivery by shifting from traditional advisory to outsource, co-source, and managed service models, particularly for actuarial functions and clients like Goldman Sachs, while determining internally what to build versus executing with alliance partners.
- Workforce transformation includes a predicted trend toward multiple careers over single trajectories, with specific AI deployment goals requiring baseline training for every professional and higher-level training for 90%, alongside decisions on onshore versus offshore allocation.
- EY aims to foster a challenger culture within regulated sectors like audit and capital markets, encouraging calculated risks, disruptive thinking, and a "one reason to say yes" leadership approach, while maintaining human oversight, judgment, and safety at the center of AI deployment.
- Global delivery centers will expand to scale tax compliance, vendor risk management, and AML, with EY acting as a "client zero" to demonstrate internal AI capabilities for tax platforms and community upskilling programs like Ripple.
- Geopolitical instability, particularly ongoing wars, is expected to remain a short-term challenge affecting mobility and personnel deployment, with potential long-term impacts on fast-growing economies in crisis zones and a risk of disrupting European innovation and deregulation trends.
- Despite short-term geopolitical headwinds, boardrooms are forecast to remain resilient with continued investment activity, and while the war has dampened the IPO market, the M&A market is expected to build momentum toward early 2026.
- Future growth will focus on managed services, co-sourcing, and technology partnerships, with the firm navigating uncertainty by prioritizing customer interaction, maintaining "ways of working" principles of constructive debate, and leveraging its scale to address the global lack of confidence.