Consultants aid OpenAI and Anthropic in enterprise market competition

The top AI startups are leveraging the expertise of major consulting firms as intermediaries in their quest to dominate the profitable enterprise sector. 

OpenAI announced this week that they have secured multi-year relationships with Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey & Company, Accenture, and Capgemini to assist companies in adopting AI within their existing frameworks, revamping processes, and deploying AI colleagues at scale alongside OpenAI's own experts.

"Collaborating closely with OpenAI boosts our capability to aid businesses in reinventing their operations to harness more value from AI," stated Ben Ellencweig, a senior partner with McKinsey, in a press release regarding the partnership.

According to OpenAI's blog, these alliances will help each company implement AI colleagues widely throughout the business.

Anthropic has made similar advancements. The previous year, the OpenAI competitor introduced a range of consulting partnerships designed to speed up AI integration at the enterprise level.

In December, it collaborated with Accenture to facilitate organisations' transition from small AI trials to broad-scale application. 

Two months before, it made an agreement with Deloitte to extend Claude's accessibility across the company's worldwide infrastructure and initiated a certification scheme to train 15,000 Deloitte employees on the model to create AI solutions for highly regulated industries, from financial services to medical and life sciences sectors.

These joint ventures highlight the critical importance for leading AI labs in ensuring businesses implement their tools.

OpenAI is in a race to demonstrate income growth. Anthropic, on the other hand, has consistently considered enterprise adoption a fundamental aspect of its long-term approach.

Anthropic has been swiftly expanding its direct offerings for enterprises. Recently, it launched a fresh batch of AI tools aimed to aid Claude's functionality in popular office software like Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint. 

It competes with tech behemoths like Microsoft and Google, which already control much of the essential office software corporate clients utilize.

However, these alliances illustrate a mutual evolution. As AI startups turn to consultancies for wider reach and credibility, consulting firms are also adapting their models to remain competitive in a tech-driven market.

Consulting companies have made a significant pivot since AI gained traction with OpenAI’s ChatGPT debut in 2022, and these partnerships are one way they’re adapting to secure their business. 

The major consulting firms emphasise that AI will soon play a central role in many of their client assignments.