OpenAI is enlisting some of the world’s biggest consulting firms in its fight to dominate the enterprise AI market.
Today the AI company announced partnerships with Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey & Company, Accenture, and Capgemini that will see the consulting firms helping to sell and implement OpenAI’s new Frontier AI agent platform. The consultants will help their clients redesign workflows, integrate AI agents with software tools and systems, help clients with change management, and provide industry-specific expertise OpenAI doesn’t have in-house.
Frontier, which OpenAI debuted earlier this month, is a system that allows businesses and organizations to build, deploy, supervise, and govern AI agents. It is part of OpenAI’s effort to seize momentum in the enterprise AI market from its arch rival Anthropic, which over the past year has made substantial inroads in the business market with its Claude Code and, more recently, its Claude Cowork products.
At the same time, the new partnership could spell trouble for established software-as-a-service vendors such as Salesforce, Workday, Microsoft, and ServiceNow. All of these companies also depend on so-called “systems integrators” such as the big consulting firms to help market and deploy their software to big companies and governments.
These SaaS vendors have also been trying to roll out AI agent platforms. But in the past month, investors have punished their shares over concerns that customers will choose OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s new AI agent products over those from the SaaS vendors, or that customers may even use AI coding tools, such as OpenAI’s Codex and Anthropic’s Claude Code, to build their own software, eliminating the need for the SaaS products altogether.
Under these new partnerships, which OpenAI has deemed Frontier Alliances, each consulting firm is investing in dedicated practice groups and building teams certified on OpenAI technology. Meanwhile OpenAI says its own “forward deployed engineers” will work alongside the teams from the consultancies in client engagements.
BCG and McKinsey are positioned primarily as strategy and operating model partners, helping leadership teams figure out where and how to deploy agents at scale. Accenture and Capgemini take more of an end-to-end systems integration role, getting into the weeds of data architecture, cloud infrastructure, and the messy business of connecting Frontier to the systems enterprises actually run on.
OpenAI describes Frontier as a “semantic layer for the enterprise”—a unified platform that lets AI agents navigate business software, execute workflows, and make decisions across an organization’s entire technology stack, such CRM systems, HR platforms, and internal ticketing tools. Early enterprise customers include Intuit, State Farm, Thermo Fisher, and Uber.
Bob Sternfels, McKinsey’s global managing partner, said in a statement accompanying the Frontier Alliances announcement that CEOs must “rewire their businesses, reimagining domains and evolving how their people work” to capture value from agentic AI. BCG CEO Christoph Schweizer echoed that sentiment, noting that AI transformation must be “linked to strategy, built into redesigned processes, and adopted at scale.”
Julie Sweet, Accenture’s CEO, said in a statement that her firm was “excited to deepen our work with OpenAI” and “to help clients turn AI into real outcomes.”
“Business transformation requires more than great models,” she said. “It requires end-to-end execution across technology, data, security, and change management.”
For investors in enterprise software companies, today’s announcement is likely to add another layer of anxiety following an already difficult few weeks. The Frontier Alliances partnership makes the threat that customers will choose OpenAI’s agent orchestration platform over traditional SaaS offerings more concrete.
Things may also get tense between the SaaS companies and the consulting firms. Accenture, Capgemini, McKinsey, and BCG are deeply embedded with the very SaaS companies that Frontier could displace. For Salesforce, Microsoft, and ServiceNow, having BCG and McKinsey actively evangelize an alternative platform to the C-suite is not a development they will welcome.
