Powering KPMG UK Audit's AI future with Databricks

Summary

KPMG UK is evolving its Audit data platform with Databricks to support AI-enabled analytics while preserving governance, rigour, and professional standards. The program converges structured data, advanced analytics, and AI on a unified cloud-native Lakehouse, with Databricks SQL replacing core SQL Server workloads and Delta underpinning the platform. Lakebridge assessed migration complexity, while Databricks-hosted large language models including Claude Sonnet and Genie Code helped convert T-SQL, refactor stored procedures, modularize queries, and suggest Delta-based optimizations under engineer review. This reduced refactoring time by around 60% and enabled modernization of more than 400 scripts and stored procedures in roughly three months. Databricks SQL Serverless provides elastic compute for spiky workloads, while Genie offers traceable, version-controlled SQL and Delta Sharing supports governed data exchange.

Takeaways

1. 1

   AI-assisted migration reduced SQL refactoring time by around 60%, allowing more than 400 scripts and stored procedures to be modernized in roughly three months with engineer validation.

2. 2

   Databricks SQL Serverless automatically scales managed compute for spiky Audit workloads ranging from thousands to billions of financial-data rows.

3. 3

   Genie generates traceable, version-controlled SQL from natural-language questions, linking results to approved and auditable data sources.