Management consulting firm PwC (PricewaterhouseCoopers) has ordered 100,000 ChatGPT Enterprise licenses from OpenAI, becoming the startup’s biggest third-party customer for the product, which is rolling out to all employees in the U.S. and UK. In addition, OpenAI has named PwC its first resale partner, making it the middleman for selling the AI company’s enterprise products to other businesses. PwC says embedding ChatGPT in its practice will make the Big Four accounting and consulting giant “uniquely positioned to help clients leverage ChatGPT Enterprise for better and faster ways of working.”

“By embracing ChatGPT Enterprise across our workforce, we will bring our first-hand experience of our AI transformation to clients, complementing our audit, tax and consulting services with a broad array of business and industry solutions,” the company said in an announcement.

OpenAI rolled out ChatGPT Enterprise last summer as part of its effort to monetize its invention and reward investors including Microsoft, which committed more than $10 billion to the fledgling firm and became its largest client, integrating ChatGPT and underlying models like GPT-4 into its business and consumer products.

“The enterprise tier offers faster, unlimited interactions and is much more flexible for building customized models for different use cases” and “comes with more analytics and other tools,” reports TechCrunch.

“Last month, OpenAI disclosed that ChatGPT’s enterprise tier had around 600,000 users,” including 93 percent of Fortune 500 companies, according to Richard Hasslacher, OpenAI global head of alliances and partnerships.

PwC has spent the past year “focused on teaching its staff how to use AI, building its own AI tools and providing them to clients, and using AI to update its consulting technology platform and operations,” writes The Wall Street Journal.

Earlier this year, the consultancy provided employees with ChatPwC, leveraging tech from both OpenAI and Microsoft Azure. The latter is a service it also brokers.

WSJ calls consulting firms “some of the early winners of the generative AI boom as companies seek help in using the new technology.” IBM Consulting has partnered with AWS to help corporate clients adapt to AI, leveraging the resources of both companies, including the IBM watsonx enterprise suite that debuted in May.

In recent weeks, Accenture and Oracle expanded their affiliation to help accelerate client adoption of generative AI. In April, Deloitte expanded its alliance with Intel to tackle the same challenge. “KPMG and Ernst & Young have also invested billions in generative AI to expand their work with clients,” says WSJ.

OpenAI “will still engage” directly with enterprises, “but it’s notable that the company is building out this channel strategy to supplement that,” explains TechCrunch.

Related:
How PwC Is Using Generative AI to Deliver Business Value, PwC, 5/29/24