OpenAI, Google and Anthropic have all been pushing hard into the enterprise for some time now. As Agentic AI takes shape and becomes the primary driver of enterprise AI adoption over and above Generative AI, this makes a lot of sense. All 3 of them are under pressure not just to grow revenue but grow margins and the enterprise seems like the best way to do so.
Having come from the enterprise software/SaaS world to the new world of Agentic AI — one thing I have observed is that Agentic AI deployments do require strategy consulting and implementation services — the term Forward Deployed Engineer was coined in the AI era to describe the kind of services enterprises need in order to adopt Agentic AI based platforms.
OpenAI started pushing heavily into the enterprise demanding $10M minimum fee engagements (an idea borrowed from Palantir) to help enterprises adopt and deploy AI. That sounded like a bad idea to me — not just because of the $10M sticker price but also because OpenAI would have to build a sizable consulting practice of the likes of an Accenture or BCG. The question is why do that?
We just got the answer from OpenAI a week ago when they, seeming to have realized they cannot go it alone, wisely have engaged Accenture, BCG, McKinsey and CapGemini as partners to sell and provide consulting services for OpenAI.
This is a brilliant move and will result in much more significant enterprise adoption of Agentic AI. Agentic AI unliked packaged SaaS software needs to be trained and customized to work with enterprise data, implement enterprise guardrails and integrate with enterprise systems or record — unlike what is being portrayed in the media, those systems are not going away anytime soon given the decades of data collection and workflows they orchestrate within the enterprise.
Consulting firms are very adept at understanding those systems of record and workflows — indeed it was these firms that implemented most of them – whether SAP for Finance, Salesforce for CRM or ServiceNow for IT operations and are best suited to lead the next wave of enterprise systems transformation led by Agentic AI.
One of the things we at DaVinci Commerce have done is architected our platform as a set of Agentic AI services that can easily be customized and plugged into these enterprise systems. Traditional SaaS platforms were not built to do this but rather were built as monolithic systems that were hard to integrate and customize for enterprise use.
AI platforms and AI tech companies collaborating with consulting firms will form the future of Agentic AI in the enterprise. This growth phase will eclipse the prior era when SaaS software took over the enterprise.
Great move by OpenAI!