Big Four consulting has 2 AI nightmares. KPMG’s answer to both is the same

The fear stalking the consulting industry right now comes in two flavors. The first is that AI can’t be trusted — that the same tools promising to transform client work will confidently produce wrong answers, expose firms to liability, and erode the hard-won trust that is the entire basis of the business. The second fear is almost the opposite: that AI works just fine, and that the companies building it will eventually use their growing power — and consulting firms’ own client data — to cut the middleman out entirely. Into the midst of this anxiety strode big blue with big news: KPMG dropped a bombshell on Monday, announcing a global alliance with Anthropic to embed Claude, the AI company’s flagship model, directly into Digital Gateway, the client delivery platform where KPMG’s 276,000-person global workforce does its actual work — auditing, advising, structuring deals, preparing taxes for some of the world’s largest companies. PwC announced its own Claude deal in the same week, although KPMG’s is unique in its “powered by Claude” capability and full integration into KPMG’s platform. Every employee, in every one of the 138 countries where KPMG operates, will now have access to Claude. The firm is also becoming Anthropic’s preferred consulting partner for private equity, meaning it will help PE firms deploy AI inside their portfolio companies. It is, by any measure, the most sweeping AI commitment any Big Four firm has made. Fortune spoke with three of the executives who built the deal to unpack why KPMG is embracing the disruption, even as outside critics are puzzled that AI is getting into the consulting business. Wharton professor Ethan Mollick, the thought leader who coined the “jagged frontier” framing for AI progress, said on Thursday at the Sana AI Summit that it’s “weird” that AI companies are building their own consulting arms to do AI deployment, noting that it contrad