OpenAI taps consulting giants to accelerate enterprise expansion

OpenAI is strengthening its relationships with four of the world’s biggest consulting firms as the company pushes harder to grow its enterprise business in 2026.

On Monday, OpenAI announced a new initiative called “Frontier Alliances,” signalling that the AI lab is prepared to take multiple routes to help large organizations adopt its technology in a deeper, more practical way. The program includes multi-year partnerships between OpenAI and four major consulting firms — Boston Consulting Group (BCG), McKinsey, Accenture, and Capgemini — to sell and roll out OpenAI’s enterprise products.

As part of the effort, OpenAI’s Forward Deployed Engineering team will collaborate with consulting firms to support customer deployments, helping integrate OpenAI’s enterprise-focused tools—including OpenAI Frontier—into existing corporate technology stacks.

OpenAI introduced OpenAI Frontier in early February. The company describes it as a no-code, open-source product that lets users build, deploy, and manage AI agents, including those powered by OpenAI models and those running on other models and tools.

In its latest announcement, OpenAI framed consultants as a key channel for driving serious enterprise adoption.

“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.”

So far, enterprise adoption of AI has moved more slowly than many predicted, as many large companies continue to struggle to prove clear, repeatable returns on investment from their AI initiatives.

OpenAI’s alliance approach aligns with that reality and appears to go beyond simply pitching enterprises on adding AI to existing workflows. Instead, the strategy relies on consultants to convince organizations to rethink their strategies, restructure processes, and adjust workflows so that OpenAI’s tools are integrated where they genuinely make business sense—not just layered on top of old ways of working.

It’s also notable that OpenAI competitor Anthropic has been signing its own consulting partnerships in recent months, including deals involving firms such as Deloitte and Accenture.

OpenAI has been signalling for weeks that enterprise growth is a major priority. In January, company CFO Sarah Friar wrote in a blog post that enterprise would be a key focus for OpenAI in 2026. The company has also secured large enterprise AI agreements with Snowflake and ServiceNow so far this year, and in January, it appointed Barret Zoph to lead its enterprise sales push.