OpenAI Teams With Consulting Firms to Boost Enterprise AI

OpenAI is collaborating with four consulting firms to help it deploy its Frontier enterprise platform.

The artificial intelligence (AI) startup on Monday (Feb. 23) announced partnerships with Boston Consulting Group (BGC), McKinsey & Company, Accenture and Capgemini.

These “Frontier Alliances” will help customers “define strategy, integrate systems, redesign workflows, and scale deployment globally,” working in tandem with OpenAI’s Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team, the company said in a news release.

McKinsey and BCG, the release added, both offer expertise to help leadership determine how to start, reshape their operating model and embed AI.

Accenture and Capgemini both advise on strategy and then help wire Frontier into the systems and data enterprises run on.

Lan Guan, the chief AI and data officer at Accenture, told CNBC OpenAI’s Frontier Alliances offer an example of how product, consulting and strategy companies should join forces to accelerate AI deployment.

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

The partnerships are happening as OpenAI is apparently close to wrapping the initial phase of a new funding round—likely to bring in more than $100 million—that could value the company at north of $850 billion.

A report on the round by Bloomberg News characterized it as a record-breaking deal that would provide OpenAI with added capital to develop its AI tools as it preps a multi-trillion dollar investment in infrastructure projects. The report also noted that the $850-plus billion figure is higher than the $830 billion initially expected.

Meanwhile, PYMNTS wrote earlier this month about the growth of enterprise AI, and its emergence as a crucial juncture in the enterprise software landscape.

That’s because “after years of software lockups across inflexible and monolithic solutions, corporate customers are increasingly demanding more from their B2B vendors because they know that more is possible,” that report said.

For B2B payments, this moment is particularly important, as payments rest at the intersection of finance, operations, risk and trust. They are repetitive, data-rich and usually manual, marking the exact type of environment where AI should shine.

“At the same time, they are unforgiving when it comes to workflow failures and downtime,” PYMNTS wrote. “The challenge for C-suite leaders is distinguishing between artificial intelligence applications that genuinely improve decision quality and resilience, and those that simply accelerate existing inefficiencies or may prove ultimately to be too fragile for the security-critical heavy-lifting many enterprise systems perform.”

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