The examine on loyalty rewards programmes was revealed by EY consultants in Canada to market their cybersecurity enterprise. Nevertheless, the report supplied made-up knowledge factors, misattributed citations, and even cited a McKinsey report that doesn’t exist, researchers at AI detection startup GPT-Zero discovered.
In response, the accounting agency has eliminated the report from its web site and has stated that it’s “reviewing the circumstances that led to this text’s publication.” The examine was not linked to tasks for any EY shopper, the corporate clarified.
The incident is the newest instance of an expert companies agency being led astray by AI. It additionally comes at a time when consulting companies are ramping up AI adoption internally by coaching workers to make use of AI instruments whereas selling their AI deployment companies to purchasers as nicely.
In October 2025, EY stated that its AI-related income had grown 30 per cent within the earlier yr and 15,000 workers had labored on shopper tasks “starting from delivering enterprise-wide transformations to AI governance frameworks that assist drive the accountable implementation of AI.”
“Publishing a report on-line is actually a type of knowledge injection into the pool of information that’s the web,” GPTZero researchers Om Ogale, Paul Esau and Alex Cui wrote in a weblog put up revealed on Thursday, Could 14.
“When the report consists of pretend data (both vibed citations or false claims) it will possibly ‘poison the nicely’ by deceptive future researchers, particularly if the report is revealed by a well known consulting agency and hosted on a high traffic web site,” they added.
Story continues beneath this advert
“EY Canada takes the accuracy of all of the content material we publish significantly, and we’ve an organisation-wide dedication to the accountable use of AI,” EY stated.
Hallucinations proceed to be a key barrier to enterprise adoption of AI, and EY is just not the one firm to have run into issues due to it. As an example, one other large 4 consultancy agency, Deloitte, was compelled to right a report for a Canadian provincial authorities in 2025 after it was revealed to comprise pretend educational citations.
In April this yr, regulation agency Sullivan & Cromwell apologised to a New York courtroom as a result of a submitting in a high-profile case repeatedly misquoted the US chapter code and cited instances incorrectly.
(function(){var l=!1;function f(){if(l||window.fbq)return;l=!0;!function(n,t,e,f,o,c,i){if(n.fbq)return;o=n.fbq=function(){o.callMethod?o.callMethod.apply(o,arguments):o.queue.push(arguments)};n._fbq||(n._fbq=o);o.push=o;o.loaded=!0;o.version=”2.0″;o.queue=[];c=t.createElement(e);c.async=!0;c.src=f;i=t.getElementsByTagName(e)[0];i.parentNode.insertBefore(c,i)}(window,document,”script”,” window?requestIdleCallback(f,{timeout:3000}):setTimeout(f,2500)})();
Leave a Reply