KPMG-Salesforce Partnership: Evolving from Implementation to Agentic Outcome

A strategic fit that can test innovation and outcome delivery readiness

KPMG’s alliance with Salesforce has moved from a high-growth implementation practice into a relationship increasingly defined by enterprise trust, measurable outcomes and the ability to operationalize agentic AI. Since entering Salesforce’s ecosystem in late 2019, KPMG has scaled the alliance to over 1,300 practitioners across more than 30 countries and is now repositioning the relationship around Agentforce-led transformation, AI-ready data foundations, and run/optimize operating models that sustain adoption. This shift mirrors a broader ecosystem trend: Leading platforms are prioritizing depth with a smaller set of preferred partners and evaluating alliances on their ability to drive usage, value realization and governance — not simply project throughput.
 
On Jan. 20, TBR spoke with KPMG’s Matthew Fidler, Global Salesforce Platform leader, U.S. Salesforce Platform & Alliance leader; and Andrew Dunn, Global Salesforce Alliance director, about the evolving relationship between KPMG and Salesforce. The following analysis reflects on this discussion and TBR’s ongoing research around KPMG and the Big Four, including our semiannual Management Consulting Benchmark and ecosystem intelligence reports.
 

 

Client stickiness will depend on KPMG’s ability to demonstrate depth around Salesforce capabilities

KPMG entered the Salesforce partner ecosystem at the end of 2019 and quickly scaled the relationship through a combination of organic capability build-outs and targeted inorganic investments. The alliance has been characterized by aggressive certification growth, expansion into core CRM clouds and industry clouds, and an increasing focus on AI-related capabilities. KPMG also extended its footprint in EMEA through the acquisition of iCom in France to accelerate regional delivery capacity.
 
From an ecosystem standpoint, KPMG’s positioning emphasizes depth over breadth. Rather than pursuing every Salesforce product adjacency, the firm prioritizes sectors where its brand and domain expertise offer an advantage (as confirmed by Salesforce feedback), especially in financial services, healthcare and life sciences, and the public sector. In addition, KPMG frames Salesforce programs as enterprise transformations, not stand-alone technology implementations, a setup that is not unique to KPMG but gives the firm an opportunity to act as more of a business integrator.
 
According to TBR’s October 2025 Adobe and Salesforce Ecosystem report, partner success is increasingly anchored in trust and clarity as platforms are narrowing their focus on fewer strategic partners while expecting those partners to lead with a unified narrative and deliver measurable outcomes. Two implications of this trend matter most for the KPMG-Salesforce partnership.
 
First, generative AI (GenAI) and agentic delivery are creating a managed services battleground. Buyers are less willing to treat AI as a phase two add-on; they expect continuous optimization, governance and data foundation work to be integrated into the program from day one. This behavior favors partners that can industrialize repeatable assets (agent templates, reference architectures and data-readiness checklists) and run them operationally after the go-live.
 
Second, misalignment between vendor and partner messaging is becoming a risk. Inconsistent positioning across the field confuses clients and erodes confidence in the ecosystem. For KPMG and Salesforce, this elevates the importance of two-way enablement: shared account planning, consistent value narratives, and clear role delineation for strategy, implementation and post-go-live operations.
 
In short, the partnership’s differentiation will be judged less by breadth of services and more by whether KPMG can act as an outcome operator for Salesforce’s Agentforce and data platform agenda — improving adoption, consumption and governance.

Salesforce’s Agentforce provides a new path for KPMG to grow the business but only if commercials are aligned

Salesforce’s Agentforce push is reducing the time between platform adoption and measurable business outcomes, but it is also raising the bar for data readiness, integration and governance. The hard part of CRM transformation is both upstream (data harmonization, integration, identity, policy) and downstream (change management, adoption analytics, continuous optimization). For Salesforce, the upstream challenge is particularly relevant. Years of expansion into adjacent workflows, via both acquisition and internal development, along with less focus on tying the whole portfolio together, have made data harmonization a serious barrier. The acquisition of Informatica was driven in part by the need to offer a native platform that could overcome this hurdle, but Salesforce has not necessarily solved the upstream challenge yet. Given AI’s dependence on quality data and cross-workflow capability, this will be a critical obstacle Salesforce must overcome as it works to scale Agentforce adoption. In this environment, partners must treat AI as an operating model program, not a feature deployment.
 
In parallel, Salesforce’s partner model is shifting toward consumption-led measurements and AI-era enterprise license constructs, increasing the importance of adoption and sustained usage. This will create a commercial and governance inflection point. GenAI improves transparency around productivity and cycle-time benefits. At the same time, customers are increasingly questioning traditional time-and-materials billing models for agent-led work. For KPMG, alliance success will increasingly depend on pairing implementation excellence with credible activation motions (value instrumentation, managed services and consumption-aligned commercial models) and tight joint enablement so the field sellers tell one consistent story.

Partner-told use cases pave the way for future right-to-win areas

To build stakeholder trust, KPMG has begun translating Agentforce into client stories and Salesforce use cases as the firm looks to win new buyer personas. For example, a joint Agentforce-driven onboarding approach for a healthcare client compressed a process from 17 days to under five minutes on average, with the majority of cases requiring zero human touch. The use case is notable because it couples orchestration with risk and decision logic and demonstrates rapid time to value. Additionally, KPMG’s work with a global consumer brand illustrates how Agentforce can augment contact center operations, including scoring 100% of interactions against quality rubrics, automating returns workflows and reducing seasonal labor needs during peak periods. KPMG is also acting as an SI to Salesforce as the latter applies agents to its security review and controls workflows, reducing review cycle time from hours to minutes. This reinforces KPMG’s credibility in regulated workflows and creates reusable assets for clients. Last, following Salesforce’s acquisition of Informatica, KPMG reorganized internally to align Salesforce, MuleSoft and Informatica under one practice and is seeing increased field attention for master data management and data foundation projects — conditions that are increasingly prerequisites for reliable agent deployments.
 
Two of the aforementioned use cases stand out: KPMG acting as an SI for Salesforce; and KPMG’s internal reorganization to align its Salesforce, MuleSoft and Informatica capabilities. The first example reflects a customer-zero approach, which is among the most widely used approaches for consultancies to demonstrate value and trust and scale through the 360-degree relationship. Although this method is not unique to KPMG, it resonates with clients seeking reassurance that third-party providers trust each other.
 
The second example extends beyond operational efficiencies as realignment allows for a better multiparty alliance construct, which can lead to higher win rates. In our special report Informatica’s Alliance Strategy: Powering GSIs, Scaling AI and Strengthening the Data Ecosystem TBR analysts spoke with Richard Ganley, senior vice president, Global Partners, who shared the following: “We looked at basically all the opportunities that we’d had in our system, which we’d either won or we’d lost over the past two years. And we found if we didn’t work with a partner, our win rate was around 17%. If we worked with one partner, it went up to 47%, which kind of makes sense because we’ve got somebody in there speaking up for us, recommending us. But if we worked with two partners, and by two we mean one from the GSI and one from the ecosystem … the win rate goes up to 83%.” With Informatica among KPMG’s top partners, KPMG has an opportunity to build a deeper moat within the data management space, which we believe will remain the battleground for client share in the short to midterm.
 
As enterprise AI projects grow more complex and interdependent, multiparty alliances are becoming a preferred delivery mode. Salesforce is responding by forming deeper relationships with hyperscalers and global systems integrators, and by shifting from referral-based partnerships toward integrated frameworks that combine infrastructure, data and services into unified operating motions. This creates an opportunity for KPMG to build reusable components and industry-specific agent templates while also taking responsibility for trust, risk management and compliance to align its data and AI strategy with Salesforce’s and to make  multiparty alliances more natively integrated and programmatic.

Doubling down on agentic AI will test KPMG’s culture and readiness to transform its operating and commercial model

As the firm looks to secure its long-term play given the rapidly evolving nature of agentic AI, in the past year KPMG has accelerated its portfolio and go-to-market transformation by embedding AI across internal operations and client services, fueled by a large amount of capex investment from within KPMG’s partner ecosystem. We believe deepening its relationship with Salesforce and integrating Agentforce into the firm’s daily operations will enable consultants to accelerate speed to value. The use of Agentforce in an era led by Microsoft Copilot and OpenAI hints at the rise of hybrid AI and how vendors are preparing for buyers to use several AI platforms rather than settling for just one.
 
We believe KPMG’s trust, risk, compliance and industry operating-model capabilities map well to these requirements, particularly in regulated environments. The firm’s cocreation mechanisms (incubator-style engagements and Ignition Center experiences) can shorten the time from pilot to production, but differentiation will depend on repeatability and operationalization: packaged agent patterns, reference architectures and managed services that demonstrate sustained KPI movement. Equally important, the partnership should treat messaging alignment as an operational discipline — shared plays, account governance and value narratives that are consistent across Salesforce sellers, KPMG teams and client stakeholders. Last, using new commercial models where KPMG can leverage Salesforce-ready solutions as a loss leader to get paid on a per-usage basis can help the firm demonstrate pricing agility and expand its addressable opportunities with more price-sensitive midsize clients.
 
According to TBR’s October 2025 Adobe and Salesforce Ecosystem report: “As both tech and services partners look to diversify sales channels, the opportunity SMB clients present will lead to new alliance partner relationships, especially with startups and/or specialized vendors, thus challenging the status quo. Services vendors have an opportunity to maintain trust by using tech vendors’ marketplaces to drive portfolio awareness. Tech vendors need to maintain commercial agility as SIs are getting smarter about building their own off-the-shelf solutions and focusing on contextualization.”
 
KPMG’s ambition to establish a stronger foothold in the GenAI space — and to use the technology to deepen client relationships — could, in time, place an additional strain on the firm’s operating model. Building, selling and managing software-like solutions introduces new requirements around talent, product management and pricing that differ from traditional consulting motions. That said, KPMG appears to be taking steps to address some of these potential challenges, which may help reduce internal friction as the shift takes hold. In parallel, the growing appeal of managed services may continue to offer a relatively straightforward path to near-term revenue, but it does not necessarily have to come at the expense of GenAI momentum. If KPMG can align incentives and capacity planning with its GenAI priorities, partners may be less likely to default to “quicker win” engagements — and the firm may be better positioned to reinforce, rather than dilute, its consulting value proposition.

Accelerating stakeholder trust remains KPMG’s top priority as the firm leans on Salesforce amid ongoing market challenges

Deepening relationships with strategic alliance partners such as Salesforce will bolster KPMG’s trust within the ecosystem, helping it increase client stickiness as clients more often look for depth than scale in the AI era. Although KPMG has a tall order in business model transformation, the firm is not alone. In the next two years, AI-ready platforms such as KPMG Velocity and KPMG Workbench, backed by common governance and an ongoing commitment to funding and positioning with clients, will accelerate KPMG’s efforts to move beyond the traditional time-and-materials operating model. Although it can be challenging to address change at scale, getting the right framework in place, including establishing common KPIs and deeper collaboration with Salesforce, will give KPMG the necessary building blocks to move away from its historically risk-averse culture rooted in audit and assurance.
 
The best way for KPMG to differentiate will be to package reusable assets, generate outcomes (adoption and consumption) and establish joint field enablement so the KPMG-Salesforce story is consistent from boardroom strategy through post-go-live operations. If KPMG executes on all of these efforts, the firm can become one of Salesforce’s most strategic partners in AI- and data-intensive sectors, helping move deals from “CRM projects” to enterprise transformations measured in data leverage, AI impact, and realized business outcomes and, in turn, driving durable platform consumption.