OpenAI calls on consultants to support its work

OpenAI is strengthening partnerships with four major consulting giants as the AI ​​company looks to grow its enterprise business in 2026.

OpenAI on Monday announced “frontier alliances,” a sign that the AI ​​lab is willing to try different approaches to getting companies to meaningfully adopt its technology. The alliance includes multi-year partnerships between OpenAI and four major consulting firms, Boston Consulting Group (BCG), McKinsey, Accenture, and Capgemini, to sell their enterprise products.

OpenAI’s advanced engineering team will work with consulting giants to help them implement enterprise-focused OpenAI technologies like OpenAI Frontier into clients’ technology stacks.

The company launched OpenAI Frontier in early February. The open, no-code software allows users to build, deploy, and manage AI agents built on OpenAI’s AI models and beyond.

In its latest announcement, OpenAI argues that advisors are the way to go on board.

“AI alone does not drive transformation,” Christoph Schweitzer, CEO of Boston Consulting Group, said in an OpenAI blog post. “It must be linked to strategy, integrated into redesigned processes, and adopted at scale with aligned incentives and culture to achieve sustainable results.” “Our expanded partnership combines OpenAI’s Frontier platform with BCG’s deep industry, functional and technical expertise and BCG X’s build and scale capabilities to deliver measurable impact with assurances from day one.”

So far, corporate adoption of AI has been relatively slow as these companies struggle to find a tangible return on investment from their AI endeavors.

OpenAI’s alliance strategy makes sense and goes beyond simply urging organizations to connect AI to existing workflows. Instead, this effort focuses on consultants who convince companies to change their strategies and workflows to use OpenAI tools when it makes sense.

It’s worth noting that OpenAI competitor Anthropic has signed deals with consulting giants including Deloitte and Accenture in recent months as well.

The company’s CFO Sarah Friar wrote in a blog post in January that enterprise is a big focus area for OpenAI in 2026. OpenAI has also signed major enterprise AI deals with Snowflake and ServiceNow so far this year, as well as naming Barret Zoph to lead the company’s enterprise sales efforts in January.