Product descriptions:
EY-Parthenon advises on thousands of high-stakes engagements annually, generating massive volumes of structured and unstructured client data. Before the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, insights were trapped in PDFs and spreadsheets, requiring weeks to extract. With Databricks Mosaic AI, EY-Parthenon built an AI-powered platform that automates document processing and helps enable KPI extraction at scale and deliver actionable insights in hours — not months. This shift is transforming the organization’s ability to provide faster, deeper and more scalable, insight-led advisory services to support mergers and acquisitions, from due diligence to value creation and transformation.
The hidden cost of expertise without scalable infrastructure
EY-Parthenon, a leader in strategy consulting, recognized growing client demand for data-driven insights alongside professional advice. In response, the organization began developing proprietary data products to complement their strategic counsel, improving and scaling the value they provide to clients. EY-Parthenon sought to build the infrastructure to standardize and scale intelligence across tens of thousands of engagements per year. “Data is the only moat we have,” Tony Qui, EY-Parthenon Global Innovation Leader, Strategy and Transactions, said. “It’s fundamental to how we protect our edge in a fast-changing market.”
At the center of this transformation was the EY-Parthenon Data Bureau Services (DBS) initiative. Designed to mine insights from client engagements and blend these with other data sources at the organization’s disposal, the DBS needed to respect local regulatory, legal and EY compliance laws and policies, while supporting the extraction of structured knowledge from highly unstructured data.
The organization quickly encountered foundational blockers. As a strategy-first organization, the EY-Parthenon technical foundation and artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure needed to evolve with their data product vision. They needed a partner — not just a platform — capable of scaling AI-powered workflows, unifying fragmented data sources and embedding intelligence securely and compliantly across global engagements.
Building a compliant and scalable AI foundation across global engagements
The organization’s transformation hinged on finding a platform that could power their vision end to end, from ingesting massive volumes of unstructured data to enabling nontechnical users to extract insights with speed and confidence. The Databricks Data Intelligence Platform enabled EY-Parthenon to accelerate development, enforce data governance, embed AI and increase scalability across the DBS initiative.
One of the first critical advantages was the inherent medallion architecture core to Databricks, which provided EY-Parthenon with a robust and proven methodology to manage the lifecycle of data, from raw ingestion (Bronze), to cleaned and structured data (Silver), to analytics-ready insights (Gold). This framework allowed the organization to move fast without having to spend years building custom infrastructure. “It’s not just the technical architecture — it’s the methodology and experience behind it,” Tony said. “It gave us confidence that we could build this the right way — without reinventing everything from scratch.” EY-Parthenon was also able to more easily manage access, enforce compliance and track lineage across their global data estate with Unity Catalog. Given the sensitivity of confidential documents and varying regional regulations, Unity Catalog played a critical role in governing data access and protecting client confidentiality while enabling federated teams to collaborate securely.
The most transformative impact, however, came from Mosaic AI and Genie spaces. EY-Parthenon uses large language models (LLMs) to sanitize documents — removing sensitive information and other personal identifiable information (PII) — with high accuracy at scale. This was essential to establish client trust and maintain compliance. On top of that, Mosaic AI powers automated KPI extraction from over hundreds of thousands of unstructured documents — including Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint decks and Word files — using a combination of fine-tuned models, Vector Search and an agent framework. Vector Search made it easy to build retrieval augmented generation (RAG) pipelines using custom embeddings, while automatic syncing with Delta tables enabled scalability and reduced operational overhead. The agent framework orchestrated multistep tasks like parsing, extraction and classification across varied file formats — limiting the need for manual intervention. Extracted KPIs are automatically stored in Delta tables and made queryable through Genie spaces, so EY-Parthenon consultants can explore benchmarks and insights in a self-service, natural language environment without waiting on engineering teams. The team also leveraged model serving and AI Gateway to manage models and reduce cost over time by transitioning from high-accuracy external models to smaller, fine-tuned ones.
In addition, EY-Parthenon architects are developing agentic and RAG capabilities to layer reasoning on top of structured and unstructured data. This allows teams to analyze complex Excel models (with 50+ tabs and tens of thousands of rows), extract only relevant KPIs and correlate them with broader sector insights — all within a single workflow. “That’s where the edge lies,” Tony said. “Being able to reason across a semi-structured spreadsheet, a text-based diligence report and a structured SQL dataset all at once — no one else is doing that at scale.”
Transforming insight delivery with AI and automation
The deployment of Databricks has delivered tangible results for EY-Parthenon teams, particularly in operational efficiency, consultant enablement and market differentiation. Today, the process of extracting insights from client engagement data is largely automated. The organization has cut the time needed to collect, sanitize and analyze data from weeks to hours, depending on the complexity of the engagement.
This acceleration is unlocking faster client delivery, but more importantly, it has elevated the ability to offer proprietary insights leveraging EY-Parthenon’s unparallelled M&A data that no other organization can match. Armed with KPIs benchmarked across thousands of past engagements, this data will enable EY-Parthenon teams to advise clients on where they stand relative to industry peers, within days of receiving their data. Whether it’s assessing selling, general and administrative expenses (SG&A) ratios for a carve-out or estimating finance department scale during an M&A deal, these insights help clients de-risk decisions, move forward with confidence and accelerate speed to and quantum of value provided.
Databricks also unlocked greater agility in service delivery, allowing EY-Parthenon teams to offer a mix of off-the-shelf benchmarks and highly customized, white-glove data products. For example, if a client requests benchmarks on a niche topic, such as NPS for women’s health tech startups, the organization can quickly mine their historical data using Delta Lake, Unity Catalog and Genie spaces to deliver a tailored answer. This balance of scalability and flexibility is helping EY-Parthenon offerings to stand out in competitive RFPs and build new revenue streams in a rapidly evolving market.
Looking ahead, the organization sees even greater potential in leveraging real-time data, combining their historical benchmarks with public and third-party sources (e.g., financial feeds, deal flow datasets, social sentiment) to surface emerging risks and opportunities for clients. This will transform diligence and strategic advisory engagements from static assessments into living, continuously updated intelligence layers. And Databricks is expected to play a key role in making this vision a reality. “We’re not far off,” Tony said. “With Databricks, we’re building the foundation to offer real-time, comprehensive insights that merge internal, external and sector-specific data in a way that’s never been done before.”
By embedding AI into every stage of the engagement lifecycle, EY-Parthenon is redefining what’s possible in strategy consulting.