OpenAI lands deals with consulting giants in enterprise push

OpenAI on Monday announced it is entering into multiyear partnerships with four consulting firms that will help the company deploy its enterprise platform called Frontier. 

The artificial intelligence startup said it has formed “Frontier Alliances” with Accenture, Boston Consulting Group, Capgemini and McKinsey & Co., according to a release. The company declined to share the financial details of the partnerships. 

Lan Guan, the chief AI and data officer at Accenture, said OpenAI’s Frontier Alliances serve as an example of how product companies, consulting companies and strategy companies should come together to accelerate AI deployment. 

“This is the inflection moment,” Guan said in an interview. “It’s our time to help enterprise clients to actually realize the value of AI.”

OpenAI is racing against rivals like Google and Anthropic to win users and market share, and the company has made an aggressive push to court enterprise customers in recent months. OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar told CNBC in January that enterprises account for roughly 40% of OpenAI’s business, though she expects that figure to reach closer to 50% by the end of the year.

Frontier, which OpenAI unveiled earlier this month, acts as an intelligence layer that stitches together disparate systems and data within an organization. It aims to make it easier for companies to manage, deploy and build AI agents, which are tools that can independently complete tasks on behalf of a user.

OpenAI said its consulting partners will help its customers define their strategy and get agents into real production workflows more quickly.

“It pairs the foundation with deep on-the-ground implementation and expertise to help companies really make this happen,” Denise Dresser, OpenAI’s chief revenue officer, told CNBC in an interview.

Dresser said OpenAI decided to partner with consulting firms because they have existing relationships with enterprises and deep knowledge about how those businesses operate. She said there’s also far more demand for AI than any one company could address on its own. 

Fernando Alvarez, Capgemini’s chief strategy and development officer, said OpenAI is counting on its Frontier Alliances to help roll out its technology at scale. 

“It’s not an easy task,” Alvarez told CNBC in an interview. “If it was a walk in the park, OpenAI would have done it by themselves, so it’s recognition that it takes a village.”

The consulting firms will work alongside OpenAI’s forward deployed engineers, who have deep technical expertise and are embedded directly within different businesses. 

The firms are also building teams and investing in “dedicated practice groups” that will be certified on OpenAI technology. They’ll be supported with road map insight, access to technical resources, and OpenAI’s product and research teams, OpenAI said.

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