AI’s biggest competitors are leaning on the McKinseys of the world to solve a problem for them: Businesses aren’t using AI to the fullest extent. Yet, getting AI deeper into business operations is where the big money is.

Among nearly 2,000 employees surveyed by McKinsey last summer, about two-thirds said their organizations hadn’t started scaling AI across the enterprise. More than half of nearly 4,500 chief executives polled by PricewaterhouseCoopers late last year said they had seen no significant financial benefit from AI so far.

OpenAI and Anthropic have been striking deals with consultants to help promote the use of their technology. In deals reached with McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, Accenture and Capgemini, OpenAI engineering teams will work alongside those firms’ consultants. Anthropic, meanwhile, announced a deal with Deloitte last year to develop industry solutions; it works with other firms, too.

“All the firms are tying themselves up with one or the other, trying to figure out who’s best to be with,” says Bill Achtmeyer, chairman at Acropolis Advisors, who sold his strategy consulting firm Parthenon to EY in 2014.

OpenAI’s Frontier platform helps companies build, deploy and manage AI agents. The company’s team of 70 so-called forward-deployed engineers work closely with companies on how to use the platform for specific needs. Now, the consulting companies will help businesses shape strategy, integrate the AI systems and redesign their workflows around the technology.

For example, Colin Jarvis, OpenAI’s global head of forward-deployed engineering, points to a large European bank where OpenAI is working with one of the consulting firms. The team considered eight use cases for Frontier, including functions related to credit risk and voice capabilities. (News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal, has a content-licensing partnership with OpenAI.)

The partnerships with consultants aim to bridge the gap between what AI can potentially do and what it is used for today.

But the firms work with many AI companies and systems, not just with OpenAI. Accenture recently struck an agreement with Mistral AI. Anthropic, which has its own ranks of forward-deployed engineers, recently announced new customizable agents for workflows in investment banking and equity research, among other areas.

AI stands apart from previous tech advances because its applications are so broad and many potential uses have yet to be discovered, says Tom Rodenhauser, managing partner of K2 Consulting Research, which tracks the industry.

AI work has increased demand for consultancies, he says. His firm’s research found global consulting grew 5.5% in 2025, double the rate of the prior year. Accenture, for instance, disclosed $2.2 billion in new AI bookings in the most recent quarter, a $400 million increase from bookings in the prior quarter.

Forging partnerships with AI companies isn’t consulting as usual. Clients are less interested in paying for a large number of junior associates to collect and synthesize data. Now, more agreements are tied to outcome-based pricing—where a firm is paid partly based on whether a project gets a specified result—rather than how many people they throw at it.

“The way we’ve known consulting over the last 50 years changes pretty dramatically,” says Rodenhauser, who adds that the near-term gains might be short-lived.

At McKinsey, the classic team model has changed to include more engineers, says Ben Ellencweig, a leader at McKinsey’s AI unit, QuantumBlack. Artificial intelligence, he says, “allows us to focus our time on the things that make us as consultants more distinctive.”

BCG views the Frontier partnership as a way to transform how companies actually run.

“We hope this accelerates a shift that was already under way at BCG, helping clients move from isolated AI pilots to full-scale reinvention of workflows,” says Dylan Bolden, a senior partner at BCG.

It is possible the consulting industry shrinks, says Achtmeyer, the chairman at Acropolis Advisors. AI’s ability to do data-crunching and analysis has raised plenty of existential questions for an industry built on human expertise.

Still, he says, company bosses will always want input from senior partners on some of the most pressing decisions they face.

Or, as Mo Koyfman, founder at the venture-capital firm Shine Capital, puts it: Companies need a human to hold responsible should anything go wrong.

“They want a throat to choke,” Koyfman says. “They want to be able to pick up a phone and call a human being and say, ‘You screwed me.’ ”