OpenAI calls in the consultants for its enterprise push

Source: TechCrunch

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

Frontier Alliance

OpenAI announced on Monday the Frontier Alliance, signaling that the AI lab is willing to try different approaches to get enterprises 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 its enterprise products.

OpenAI’s Forward Deployed Engineering team will work with the consulting giants to help them implement OpenAI’s enterprise‑focused technologies like OpenAI Frontier into customers’ tech stacks.

OpenAI Frontier

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

Why Consultants?

OpenAI argues that consultants are the right avenue to get enterprises on board.

“AI alone does not drive transformation. It must be linked to strategy, built into redesigned processes, and adopted at scale with aligned incentives and culture to deliver sustained outcomes,” BCG CEO Christoph Schweizer said in OpenAI’s blog post. “Our expanded partnership combines OpenAI’s Frontier platform with BCG’s deep industry, functional, and tech expertise and BCG X’s build‑and‑scale capabilities to drive measurable impact with safeguards from day one.”

Enterprise Adoption Landscape

Thus far, enterprise adoption of AI has been relatively slow as companies struggle to find a meaningful return on investment from their AI pursuits.

OpenAI’s alliance strategy goes beyond merely pitching AI onto existing workflows. Instead, it focuses on consultants persuading companies to change their strategies and processes to incorporate OpenAI’s tools where they make sense.

Competitive Context

It’s worth noting that OpenAI’s rival Anthropic has also inked deals with consulting giants, including Deloitte and Accenture in recent months.

Additional Enterprise Moves

• Company CFO Sarah Friar highlighted in a January blog post that enterprise is a big area of focus for OpenAI in 2026 (source).
• OpenAI has signed sizable enterprise AI deals with Snowflake and ServiceNow this year.
• In January, OpenAI named Barret Zoph to lead its enterprise sales effort.