- AI startups are increasingly relying on consultants to distribute their technology to companies.
- Working with AI startups has become a key survival tactic for consulting firms.
- The result: partnerships galore.
Things are getting serious.
For consulting firms, partnering with AI startups has become a key survival tactic as the technology upends everything about their industry. And for AI startups, consulting firms have become an important channel for distributing their products to companies.
The love affair between the two was apparent in a flurry of recent dalliances.
Google announced Wednesday it was launching a $750 million fund to help consulting firms like McKinsey, Accenture, and Deloitte roll out agentic AI to their clients.
McKinsey and Google have also created a new working group to help companies go from identifying AI opportunities to building and scaling them across the business.
Also on Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI was working with consulting firms like Accenture, Capgemini, and PwC to sell its AI coding assistant, Codex, to companies.
The rationale is simple: AI technology is moving so fast that Silicon Valley and the consulting industry need each other.
Ben Ellencweig, a senior partner at McKinsey who leads alliances, acquisitions, and partnerships for its AI arm, Quantum Black, told Business Insider in an interview that the firm has quadrupled its ecosystem of tech partners since the launch of ChatGPT.
He added that the depth of the firm's relationships and the level of collaboration have "grown dramatically" in the past few years.
He said McKinsey operates an "ecosystem of alliances and acquisitions" with hundreds of contributors, including key players such as AWS, Amazon, Nvidia, and OpenAI, that it leverages to tailor solutions for clients.
Amid the deluge of new products and AI startups, Ellencweig said the firm still adheres to a rigorous vetting process. "There's a bit of a dating period that we get to know each other," he said. "Partnering means a two-way street."
Given the pace of the AI boom, however, he said the firm is more willing these days to team up with smaller companies.
Former McKinsey consultants told Business Insider that these alliances also fill the talent gap needed to marry the raw models coming out of AI labs with the needs of corporate clients.
These consultants said their role is to bring these models to the enterprise level — customizing them with data, adding appropriate guardrails, and helping clients implement them in specific contexts. Many of the models fresh out of Silicon Valley simply aren't enterprise-ready, consultants said.
McKinsey says about 40% of its work now comes from generative AI-related projects. BCG said 20% of its work was AI-related in 2024.
Andy Triedman, a partner at Theory Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm focused on data and AI, told Business Insider that tech startups have long relied on consulting firms to help sell their products to enterprise clients, but are now partnering much earlier as pressure builds to adapt to AI.
Before ChatGPT, he said, partnerships typically happened once startups reached $10 million or more in revenue — about two to four years in. Now, they're forming at the $2 million to $5 million mark, when companies are only 12 to 18 months old.
Triedman, a former Bain consultant, said the AI ecosystem around consulting firms falls into three main buckets: enterprise software startups that partner with consultants to distribute and implement their products, AI-native consulting firms that compete with traditional players, and smaller AI tools that automate core consulting work, which could become acquisition targets for bigger consulting firms.
"It's a mutually beneficial relationship between the two," Triedman said.
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