The biggest AI startups are now using the biggest consulting firms as proxies in their battle to control the lucrative enterprise market.
OpenAI this week announced multi-year partnerships with Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey & Company, Accenture, and Capgemini to help companies integrate AI into existing systems, rethink workflows, and deploy AI coworkers at scale alongside OpenAI engineers.
“Working side by side with OpenAI enhances our ability to help companies reimagine their business to capture more value from AI,” Ben Ellencweig, a McKinsey senior partner, said in a press release announcing the partnership.
The partnerships will help each firm deploy AI coworkers across the enterprise, according to OpenAI’s blog post.
Anthropic has made similar moves. Last year, the OpenAI rival rolled out its own slate of consulting partnerships to accelerate enterprise adoption.
In December, it teamed up with Accenture to help “enterprises move from AI pilots to full-scale deployment.” Two months earlier, it struck a deal with Deloitte to make Claude available across the firm’s global network and launched a certification program to train 15,000 Deloitte staffers on the model to build AI solutions for clients in regulated industries, from financial services to healthcare and life sciences.
These partnerships underscore how important it is to the leading AI labs that companies adopt their tools. OpenAI is racing to show revenue growth. Anthropic, meanwhile, has long made enterprise a cornerstone of its long-term strategy.
Anthropic has been rapidly expanding its direct enterprise offerings. This month, it introduced a new suite of AI tools designed to help Claude operate inside popular workplace applications like Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint. It’s also up against tech giants like Microsoft and Google, which already control much of the workplace software that corporate clients rely on.
But these partnerships underscore a two-way shift. As AI startups look to consultancies for distribution and credibility, consulting firms are simultaneously reworking their own models to stay competitive in an AI-driven market.
Consulting firms have pivoted hard since AI blew onto the scene with the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022, and these partnerships are just one way they are evolving to shore up their business. The big consulting firms say AI will soon make up a significant share of their client work.
At McKinsey, where AI agents are rapidly multiplying alongside its 40,000-person workforce, senior partners told Business Insider that roughly 40% of the firm’s work is now analytics- or AI-related and shifting toward generative AI.
BCG, too — where nearly 90% of its 33,000 employees use AI — says it has created more custom GPTs than any other OpenAI customer, with five times as many employees building them as a year ago, according to Alicia Pittman, the head of BCG’s global people team.
Despite the hype around AI consultants told Business Insider there is still a long way to go before these tools are embedded in consulting firms’ workflows.
“Everyone has Copilot, and everyone has GPT or Claude,” Mina Alaghband, a former McKinsey partner, told Business Insider. “I would say at McKinsey, there are some use cases where those tools are applicable, but there are many where they are not sufficiently enterprise-grade. They don’t have sufficient guardrails.”
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