AI boom deepens ties between Silicon Valley and consulting as Google launches $750 million fund
Artificial intelligence is rewriting the playbook for the consulting business, drawing Silicon Valley and blue-chip advisory firms into unusually tight alignment. On Wednesday, Google announced a $750 million fund to help consultancies including McKinsey, Accenture, and Deloitte roll out agentic AI to their clients.
McKinsey and Google also formed a working group aimed at helping companies move from identifying AI use cases to building and scaling them across the enterprise. The Wall Street Journal reported the same day that OpenAI is working with firms such as Accenture, Capgemini, and PwC to sell its AI coding assistant, Codex, to corporate customers.
The logic behind the flurry of deals is straightforward: AI is advancing so quickly that both sides need each other. For consultancies, partnerships have become a key survival tactic as the technology upends their industry. For startups, the firms offer a powerful route into large enterprises that still rely on trusted advisers to evaluate, customize, and implement new tools.
Ben Ellencweig, a senior partner at McKinsey who leads alliances, acquisitions, and partnerships for its AI arm, Quantum Black, said the firm has quadrupled its ecosystem of tech partners since the launch of ChatGPT. The depth of relationships and level of collaboration have "grown dramatically" in recent 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. Despite the rush of new products, Ellencweig said McKinsey maintains 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 added that the firm is more willing to team up with smaller companies.
Former McKinsey consultants said these alliances help bridge a talent and execution gap: taking raw models from AI labs to the enterprise level by customizing them with proprietary data, adding appropriate guardrails, and implementing them in specific contexts.
Many models fresh out of Silicon Valley simply aren't enterprise-ready, they 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 focused on data and AI and a former Bain consultant, said tech startups have long relied on consultancies to reach enterprise buyers, but are now partnering much earlier as pressure builds to adapt to AI. Before ChatGPT, he said, such tie-ups typically occurred once startups hit $10 million or more in revenue — two to four years in.
Now, they are forming at the $2 million to $5 million mark, when companies are only 12 to 18 months old.
He described three buckets in the consulting-AI ecosystem: enterprise software startups that partner with consultancies for distribution and implementation; AI-native consulting firms that compete with traditional players; and smaller AI tools that automate core consulting work, which could become acquisition targets for larger firms.
"It's a mutually beneficial relationship between the two," Triedman said. With fresh funding, formal working groups, and earlier-stage tie-ups, both Silicon Valley and consulting firms are accelerating efforts to get AI into the hands of corporate clients — and to make sure those deployments can scale.