Google recently announced its partnership with Accenture, Deloitte, and McKinsey—backed by a $750 million fund—to speed up enterprise adoption of its tech stack.
I believe that rather than accelerating the successful adoption of AI, this partnership will kneecap it—and break down trust in the wider consultancy industry in the process.
Why? Because the success of both of these things is premised on trust. Enterprises, having come through a rough period of hype-driven spending on artificial intelligence, are now looking for AI investments they can trust to deliver results. In that search, they’re turning to their trusted consulting partners to support them through the digital transformation.
Yet through this commercial partnership, these big-ticket consultancies have tied their bottom lines directly to how much AI they can sell—putting this into direct conflict with their commitment to deliver results to their clients above all else.
If Google’s sales goals and the needs of the enterprise clients diverge—which, as we will get on to, is likely to occur—then the consultants will have to pick a side. I don’t want to be too pessimistic about my own industry, but the cash-flush AI lab seems likely to win at least some of those tussles.
Uncertainty and vulnerability
But, is it all bad? Surely closer ties will facilitate more seamless rollouts, support faster execution, and offer discounts? There are certainly benefits. It’s also not uncommon for consultancies to have partners (my consultancy counts Xerox as a client and has clearance to sell Xerox solutions to other clients).
The difference is that AI is developing at hyper speed. That creates uncertainty in humans and vulnerabilities in technology. Objective, balanced counsel is more important than ever under these circumstances.
First, the “best” technology is constantly changing. Over the past three years, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude have each, at various times, pulled ahead of the others in terms of capability. Another DeepSeek-style challenger could come out of left field and displace them all tomorrow.
An objective AI consultant should be promoting model flexibility for long-term resilience from shocks, including in prices. I fear Google’s new $750 million partnership—and, for what it’s worth, OpenAI’s very similar Frontier Alliance, announced in February—is selling dependence, which could very quickly lead to frustration with the technology and its new salespeople.
Second, even the most technologically smart enterprise clients can’t, and may never, deeply understand AI; even its architects don’t really know how it works. These clients are in the dark—and are turning to consultancies to help them review their options, strategize implementation, and then execute it with guardrails.
The consulting industry should be playing the cool, calm, and collected mediator role—cutting through the sales speak of Big AI and the pressure on and within enterprises to innovate with AI. If, instead, we’re further contributing to the furor or pushing our own agenda or that of a partner, then our clients may begin cutting us out of the loop.
Third, enterprises are careful beasts. They have reputations to defend and many stakeholders to safeguard. Security and compliance are, rightly, high on their agenda. AI’s impact on these isn’t yet fully understood, but we know it to be massive.
A risky play
If consultancies are incentivized to sell AI and sell it fast, it seems likely to me that speed of adoption will increasingly trump security and compliance in consultants’ decisions and advice. That’s a very risky play, quite literally.
Finally, because there has been such a rush to deploy AI quickly—fueled in part by large consultancies’ scaremongering—a lot of resources have already been spent on AI. Much of this poured down the drain, with little to show for it. Enterprises’ boards have had enough, and now need to see results.
If, then, the consulting partners clients have trusted to deliver those results start sounding like AI salespeople, and seem to be neglecting long-term resilience—which comes with model flexibility, security, and compliance—or taking advantage of a lack of understanding of AI to upsell, then clients’ trust in these supposed paragons of objectivity, and the technology they sell, will nosedive.
A July 2025 MIT report found that 95% of enterprise gen AI initiatives were delivering zero measurable return. This jolted the enterprise landscape and contributed to an AI-stock selloff. Consultants and AI labs should take note.
Enterprise AI clients pay attention to results, and they need to see returns on their investments.
If we now see AI rushed through by consultancies partnered with AI labs, then yet more dreary figures will emerge about unsuccessful AI initiatives. This will dampen appetite for AI and come full circle for both the consultancies and the labs—putting clients off them both in equal measure.