McKinsey partners with Cohere to help enterprise clients adopt generative AI, after Deloitte partnered with Nvidia and Bain and Company teamed up with OpenAI
Krystal Hu / Reuters :
Context & Ripple Effects
The big consultancies are each locking in a model vendor as their generative-AI engine: Deloitte paired with Nvidia, Bain with OpenAI, and now McKinsey with Cohere — a startup whose $450M raise at a $5B valuation was backed by Nvidia, Salesforce, and Cisco precisely because it sells to enterprises. The prize on both sides is distribution: the labs need trusted hands inside corporate IT, and the firms need a differentiated AI offering.
The commercial pull is already visible — BCG now earns 20% of its revenue from AI-related work, up from zero two years ago — so a model alliance is becoming table stakes for keeping advisory share.
First-order effects
- McKinsey can now bundle Cohere's models into client engagements, while Cohere gains McKinsey's enterprise client base as a sales channel it could not build alone.
- Deloitte and Bain face a rival whose offering no longer depends on a competitor's model stack, pushing each to deepen its own vendor tie.
Second-order effects
- Model vendors are effectively competing through consultancy intermediaries — OpenAI via Bain, Nvidia via Deloitte and Accenture's 30K-employee training program — making partner firms the pricing and packaging layer for enterprise AI.
- Mid-tier consultancies without an exclusive lab alliance risk being squeezed between MBB firms with preferred model access and clients who can buy directly.
Third-order effects
- If every major firm anchors to a model vendor, enterprise AI adoption structurally routes through a handful of consultancy-lab pairs, concentrating go-to-market power in firms like McKinsey rather than in the labs' own sales teams.
- McKinsey's later use of AI agents for its own client-onboarding work hints at the end state: the firms become both resellers and operators of the technology they advise on, blurring the line between advisor and vendor.
The trend: Enterprise generative AI is being distributed through exclusive consultancy-model-vendor alliances, turning the big firms into the primary channel through which foundation models reach corporate buyers.