OpenAI teams up with consulting giants to boost its enterprise business

OpenAI has a new sales force to market its enterprise AI tools to big corporations.

In a press release, the ChatGPT maker unveiled a number of “Frontier Alliances” with consulting companies Accenture, Boston Consulting Group, Capgemini, and McKinsey.

“Frontier” refers to OpenAI’s platform introduced earlier this month that “helps enterprises build, deploy, and manage AI agents that can do real work.”

These alliances come amid an industrywide love affair with Anthropic’s Claude Code, which has juiced the startup’s revenue projections.

Companies may want to introduce AI tools, but do not have a good strategy around how to get started. That’s where consulting companies come in.

For companies in that situation, going to one of these consulting firms for AI-related help might now be like going to a financial adviser who gets an extra commission from having you invest in a specific fund offered by the investment arm of their firm.

The consulting industry was a forerunner to software in terms of facing AI disruption and, in the case of Accenture, seeing its share price slump as the market rallied. Employment in the sector peaked right around the time that ChatGPT was launched.

For Accenture, this marks the latest in a series of AI collaborations and builds off its prior partnership with OpenAI. The positive spin on this strategy from Accenture's perspective is that management is accepting that the consulting business will be fundamentally transformed by AI, and wants to be among the first movers in adapting to survive that transition. Uncharitably, as we’ve said, this is “training your replacements.”