The fear stalking the consulting industry right now comes in two flavors. The first is that AI can’t be trusted — that the same tools promising to transform client work will confidently produce wrong answers, expose firms to liability, and erode the hard-won trust that is the entire basis of the business. The second fear is almost the opposite: that AI works just fine, and that the companies building it will eventually use their growing power — and consulting firms’ own client data — to cut the middleman out entirely.
Into the midst of this anxiety strode big blue with big news: KPMG dropped a bombshell on Monday, announcing a global alliance with Anthropic to embed Claude, the AI company’s flagship model, directly into Digital Gateway, the client delivery platform where KPMG’s 276,000-person global workforce does its actual work — advising, structuring deals, preparing taxes for some of the world’s largest companies. PwC announced its own Claude deal in the same week, although KPMG’s is unique in its “powered by Claude” capability and full integration into KPMG’s platform.
