OpenAI calls in the consultants for its enterprise push

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

OpenAI announced on Monday the “Frontier Alliances,” a signal 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.

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 AI models and beyond.

OpenAI argues in its latest announcement 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.”

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

OpenAI’s alliance strategy makes sense and goes beyond just pitching enterprises on attaching AI to their existing workflows. Instead, this effort focuses on consultants persuading companies to change their strategies and workflows to fold in OpenAI’s tools where it makes sense.

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

Company CFO Sarah Friar wrote in a blog post in January that enterprise is a big area of focus for OpenAI in 2026. OpenAI has also inked sizable enterprise AI deals with Snowflake and ServiceNow so far this year, in addition to naming Barret Zoph to lead the company’s enterprise sales effort in January.