From May 20 to 21, 2026, in Dallas, Hitachi Digital Services hosted close to 100 analysts and advisers for a two-day summit featuring Hitachi leaders, clients and technology partners. The following reflects TBR’s observations from the event, informal conversations with Hitachi leaders and clients, and TBR’s ongoing analysis of the overall IT services and professional services space.

Hitachi Digital Services perfectly positioned to take advantage of IT-OT convergence and AI adoption

Two tectonic technology shifts happening now and opening massive revenue opportunities play straight into Hitachi’s strengths, positioning Hitachi Digital Services for significant growth over the next five years. With IT and OT convergence accelerating and enterprises increasingly adopting AI at scale, Hitachi Digital Services can rely on Hitachi’s engineering DNA, deep expertise in specific industries, and firsthand experience in manufacturing as the foundation for a build-integrate-operate value proposition. The analysts and advisers event highlighted how well Hitachi Digital Services brings the entire Hitachi company to its clients, remains rooted in Hitachi’s engineering approach to everything, and maintains its focus on strategic priorities, even as the market shifts all around them.

Although smaller than the typical IT and professional services firms covered by TBR, Hitachi Digital Services warrants close attention in the coming years. Its distinctive business model, strategic direction and performance — particularly its combination of IT, OT, AI and domain expertise — position Hitachi Digital Services as a potential outlier in the IT services landscape.

Hitachi’s broader capabilities and assets help Hitachi Digital Services deliver unique combination of IT, OT and AI

Though only a two-day event, Hitachi included an impressive breadth of client speakers and panel participants, all from Hitachi Digital Services’ core industries, while also bringing technology partners into the discussion, occasionally simultaneously. One major telecom player described their relationship with Hitachi Digital Services as a client and with Hitachi overall as a go-to-market technology partner. An automotive client praised Hitachi Digital Services’ ability to “make our problems their problems to solve” and called out Hitachi’s “asset knowledge,” which blended IT capabilities with OT experience.

During onstage presentations and informal discussions with TBR, clients noted the importance of Hitachi Digital Services’ ability to seamlessly tap into the larger Hitachi organization and bring deeply technical engineering expertise to bear. Not surprisingly, clients attending the event also noted their well-established relationships with Hitachi, reinforcing Hitachi Digital Services’ messages around sustained focus on clients’ evolving issues. TBR’s assessment of Hitachi Digital Services’ client service value proposition and technology partner alliance strategy could be best summed up by a comment from a cloud vendor on stage with Hitachi Digital Services: “showing up together with Hitachi, delivering results, day after day.”

On Day 1 of the summit, a senior Hitachi Digital Services executive said the company maintained an “R&D and engineering first, consulting second mindset,” a sentiment echoed throughout the event. Another executive noted that innovation “starts with Hitachi engineering R&D.” Discussions around IT-OT convergence and Industry 5.0 included elements of consulting but remained rooted in engineering. For example, when discussing IT and OT convergence, Hitachi leaders described the company’s state-of-the-art railcar manufacturing plant in Maryland, a real, physical, operational test bed for digital innovations and Hitachi Digital Services’ IT + OT + AI value proposition. For Industry 5.0, Hitachi executives discussed Hitachi Digital Services’ overall AI strategy and noted the confluence of human and AI collaboration aided by AI agents.

In TBR’s view, the consistent undercurrent of engineering and R&D separates Hitachi Digital Services from peers in the IT services and consulting space, in part because of the credibility behind Hitachi’s “engineering first” assertion. Any company can say it has engineering capabilities; Hitachi builds railcars.

Domain expertise and organizational intelligence needed for broader AI adoption and agentic AI

Regarding AI, leaders at Hitachi Digital Services emphasized that effective AI begins with deep knowledge. Hitachi brings a strong foundation in business, operations, design, manufacturing and maintenance — an extensive base of expertise that it leverages to power its AI initiatives. In short, Hitachi Digital Services professionals argued they have more robust intelligence to feed into AI models and algorithms than most peers. Hitachi leaders also highlighted the company’s focus on organizational intelligence and its long-standing capabilities around “capturing the intelligence of complex organizations.”

In TBR’s view, Hitachi’s only complex organization likely provides a useful starting point for understanding the applicability of AI in organizational intelligence. Regarding agentic AI, Hitachi Digital Services leaders said AI agents must be specific to a domain, such as industrial AI, engineering AI or cybersecurity AI — an assertion that plays to Hitachi’s strengths. They also expect agentic AI adoption will accelerate in 2026, particularly around process and application modernization. One Hitachi Digital Services leader anticipated a shift from “minimum viable product” to “minimum viable agent,” a neat turn of phrase that might indicate both a shift toward a more consulting-focused mindset and internal pressures to deploy more AI-enabled assets. TBR notes that every one of Hitachi Digital Services’ competitors is working through those same shifts.

Mission-critical IT + OT + AI

In TBR’s view, Hitachi Digital Services’ ability to lean on the broader Hitachi company’s engineering expertise and real-world physical assets provides Hitachi Digital Services with clear separation from peers in the IT services space. If Hitachi Digital Services can deliver results in mission-critical — and constantly moving — settings, such as railway operations, clients in less dynamic environments can be assured of its capabilities.

Hitachi leaders noted shifts in the broader IT and OT spaces, such as the greater attention being paid to cybersecurity risks in OT and CFOs being generally more aware of the costs of funding fully separate IT and OT systems, which TBR believes may accelerate IT-OT convergence. Complemented by AI and infused with domain expertise, Hitachi Digital Services, in TBR’s view, should maintain a clearly differentiated position within the digital transformation and IT services space.

As a potential partner for large ISVs and cloud hyperscalers, Hitachi Digital Services’ combination of IT, OT and AI capabilities provides easily understandable differentiation. For large enterprises in Hitachi Digital Services’ target industries, Hitachi’s track record in mission-critical environments and the company’s sustained R&D and innovation create a compelling value proposition.

TBR will be more closely tracking Hitachi Digital Services’ evolution, particularly as IT-OT convergence accelerates and Hitachi Digital Services’ role in the broader ecosystem grows.

On April 15 and 16, PwC Japan hosted over 20 analysts, a partner and PwC executives for a day and a half summit at the company’s Technology Laboratory in Tokyo. Chief Strategy Officer and Chief Innovation Officer Kenji Katsura set the tone when opening the meeting by explaining that over the course of the event attendees would be hearing from leaders across PwC’s businesses — including audit, tax, deals and consulting — highlighting the importance of PwC’s strategy to deliver the full range of the firm’s expertise to clients. While ensuring that PwC’s services remain highly relevant to clients in Japan, the firm’s GTM strategy is closely aligned with its global network. This alignment allows PwC Japan to leverage the best practices and innovations from across the network while also contributing homegrown insights and advancements that can benefit clients worldwide.

The event included demos, presentations and one-on-one breakouts that allowed analysts to gain firsthand knowledge of PwC Japan’s evolving strategy. Demonstrating culture and an understanding of local business dynamics still provides an important nuance that allows PwC to elevate the value of its services, especially in the current uncertain geopolitical environment, as having highly country-specific capabilities and dedicated staff may become a greater asset than more explicitly globalized organizations. The following write-up summarizes TBR’s takeaways from the event and provides a glimpse into what we believe will set the next chapter of PwC’s business.

As a node in PwC’s ever-expanding ecosystem, Technology Laboratory brings art and science together through physical assets

Starting with a hands-on demo led by Technology Laboratory lead Shinichiro Sanji, PwC’s Technology Laboratory team demonstrated the pivot the firm has begun making in its interactions with clients, where the outcome of workshops has evolved beyond the art of the possible and into tangible solutions backed by the use of physical assets. Responsible for PwC’s tech-driven go-to-market strategy, which builds a business pipeline through cross-industry collaboration, Technology Laboratory in Tokyo is a first of its kind and enables the firm to demonstrate how it can interlink buyers beyond the traditional IT and/or finance functions into operational technology.

The cocreation of assets with commercial and public clients as well as academia will also help PwC demonstrate understanding and connectivity of physical AI and revamp industries where industrialized robotics are heavily in use. The Experience Center also remains an integral part of the Technology Laboratory’s success as creating future scenarios based on market and industry trends necessitates market insights delivered through multidisciplinary skills teams. With the Technology Laboratory and Experience Center housed adjacent to each other, it streamlines collaboration and interaction between teams when needed, while maintaining enough separation to enhance the unique value each team contributes during client workshops.

Meanwhile, as PwC strengthens its local relationships, it also continues to build nodes across its member firms that demonstrate an appetite for innovation and support client needs. For example, the firm recently announced the opening of the OT Cyber Lab in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the expansion of PwC’s Reinvention Lab in Australia, where it added hands-on capabilities for clients to test out advanced technologies.

We see PwC’s Business Experience Technology (BXT) and Business Model Reinvention (BMR) frameworks as the connecting glue between the various labs across PwC member firms, especially as the BXT raised the bar high for the firm’s consultants to drive outcomes. Now BMR provides a structured approach for the labs to have guided conversations with clients around their functional technology needs.

Maintaining continuity in executing against strategic priorities brings PwC closer, one member firm at a time

Following the Technology Laboratory demo, Masataka Kubota, Chair and Territory Senior Partner, PwC Japan Group CEO, kicked off the event by setting a high-level agenda centered on five megatrends: Climate Change, Tech Disruption, Demographic Shift, Fracturing World and Social Instability. These themes guided PwC’s presentations across its Assurance, Tax, Advisory and Consulting practices, with each area exploring or delving deeper into these trends.

PwC executives’ emphasis on reinforcing the alignment of PwC Japan and PwC Global strategies around BMR, trust, sustainability, and AI and data closely resonated with what TBR heard in a pair of similar events in the fall of 2024 in EMEA and the U.S. Kubota further amplified PwC member firms’ efforts around unity. PwC Japan’s regional customization and diversity remain vital to the firm’s success, especially as local clients lean on the company’s expertise and guidance to navigate choppy international market conditions.

Masaki Yasui, PwC Japan Group’s Consulting leader, continued the discussion, providing an update and insights into the firm’s line of business. Doubling in size in terms of people since late 2018, PwC Japan’s Consulting practice now houses 5,130 of the firm’s more than 12,700 employees in Japan and has grown at a double-digit rate for around 10 years — a pace that is expected to be sustained through 2030, according to Yasui. This will be an impressive achievement for PwC Japan’s consulting business, given the macroeconomic headwinds and impact on discretionary spending and consequently on consulting opportunities.

According to TBR’s management consulting research, consulting revenue experienced a deceleration in 2024 of 3.1% year-to-year, down from 8.1% in 2023, a trend we expect to continue throughout 2025.

Deploying tech-enabled arbitrage model will test PwC’s readiness to transform its professional services model, with consulting being most ripe for it

Leaning on the firm’s ongoing success rooted in its client-centric approach, focus on priority accounts, portfolio expansion and investment in growth areas provided a strong foundation for PwC Japan’s consulting growth. While these efforts are not unique to PwC, we believe what has helped the firm thus far is its collaborative culture across lines of business, making it appealing for partners to be part of. Growth will likely come from PwC Japan investing in new services to meet demand with BMR, strengthening its digital core, and front-office transformation serving as the lead in parts of the clients’ discussions.

Meanwhile, focusing on multinational clients while tapping into the power of PwC Japan’s Business Network will help the firm bridge opportunities with global clients in and outside Japan, further amplifying the need for better member firm collaboration. PwC Japan recognizes the evolving professional service market dynamics and has built out a new three-layer model for sustainable growth, with the key separation between the first and second layers being less human-dependent. Executing on the second and third layers, which are largely focused on accounting for changes in staffing and commercial models enabled through data intelligence and data monetization, will once again test PwC Japan’s collaborative culture, as often such initiatives are more challenging to be sold and managed internally than to bring externally with clients.

Many professional services companies grapple with similar challenges largely because of the time and materials (T&M) commercial model that consulting companies typically employ for such services. Developing data monetization and a fee-for-service type of model essentially requires companies like PwC to depart from the T&M model. We believe PwC Japan is one step ahead of many of its competitors in that regard as its consulting business has largely been driven by fixed-price engagements, making it easier to bridge into the fee-for-service setup it is looking to pursue as part of its layers two and three strategies.

The challenge for PwC Japan will be to educate other member firms on how to approach the opportunities, as elsewhere T&M remains the predominant commercial model. Further, PwC Japan, just like other member firms, sees managed services as part of its ability to continue to grow its business. While it is still a small portion of the current revenue composition (about 4% to 6% at the global level, according to TBR estimates), the firm continues to explore avenues to augment that gap, with leaning on its tax and cyber practice capabilities, delivery partners, and acquisitions among its top choices.

PwC’s Industrial Structural Transformation framework: A road map to the firm’s ability to execute through integrated scale and packaged services

Here lies the opportunity for PwC: developing a framework that demonstrates unity and focus while relying on its core success around trust. During the event, PwC unveiled an Industrial Structural Transformation (IST) framework, which we believe provides the necessary road map to execute against the firm’s aspiration of what the next chapter of the firm might look like. Bringing together all parts of the business — Assurance, Tax, Advisory and Consulting — and replicating them across industries while using data intelligence and a fee-for-service commercial model can help PwC build a foundation that resonates across all member firms.

Starting with use cases in Japan across segments like mobility provides a glimpse into how the framework can be applied as the evolution of AI extends into the physical world, and how the architecture of the entire industry can be transformed beyond the use of the software to include the business and social rules. Developing the backbone of going to market through integrated scale is the first step. Executing against it, especially bringing use cases outside of Japan to other member firms, which often deal with their local client issues, can prove to be a rewarding challenge.

Three key areas which PwC Japan discussed at length during the event — sustainability, risk management and tax — brought to light the closer collaboration and applicability of the framework at scale between the various parts of PwC’s portfolio. Sustainability and risk management bring together assurance and consulting while tax provides a conduit for closer collaboration with consulting.

Developing solutions that are function-specific provides the necessary horizontal connection across these areas while relying on the firm’s industry knowledge to demonstrate value and deliver outcomes. We believe a large portion of PwC’s success will come from including its technology partners at every step of development, deployment and management of its IST framework as partner feedback and knowledge management have become as critical as ever to understand how professional services companies go to market.

Application of technology solutions beyond the marketing hype elevates PwC Japan’s soberness and readiness to support the global network in handling macro disruptors

Virtually no market discussions today exclude data and AI. Takuya Fujikawa, PwC Japan Group Chief AI Officer, Data and AI Leader, took the opportunity to provide an update on the firm’s data and AI practice at the onset of the second day of the event. One important nuance struck TBR about PwC Japan’s portfolio: its applicability of AI across multiple domain areas, rather than simply drilling down on generative AI or agentic AI, which have been the predominant focus in similar settings. Adhering to open data principles while relying on its industry and functional expertise provides a strong foundation for the firm’s data and AI portfolio with examples around threat intelligence, intelligent business analytics or power market analytics highlighting various use cases.

With PwC US recently launching the Agentic Operating System, we expect PwC Japan to lean on these experiences and capabilities and follow suit with agentic AI solutions that meet local client needs for driving efficient operations. We expect the rollout to be bidirectional and other member firms to look to collaborate with PwC Japan on emulating its portfolio offerings. Scaling the use of such solutions will fit nicely and support PwC Japan consulting’s three-layer growth model, especially around the data intelligence and data monetization opportunities and the tech-enabled arbitrage model.

Additionally, discussions throughout the second day provided deeper insights into other strategic domains of PwC Japan’s portfolio, such as sustainability and trust, including cybersecurity. Common themes across value creation enabled through technology amplified the need for better alignment among practice areas within PwC Japan, especially as buyers’ focus in each area has shifted toward translating respective market challenges to business implications.

Within sustainability, PwC remains focused on creating customer value by emphasizing cross-business themes, including decarbonization and biodiversity, with most of the opportunities centered on government reporting mandates, further demonstrating the need for collaboration between audit and consulting services.

Withing trust, leadership highlighted cybersecurity and cyber intelligence services – both important elements of PwC Japan’s strategy – including its collaboration with delivery partners, such as with TIS Inc. for use of remote monitoring, alert responses and emergency interventions, among other security services.

Enabled by a humble and gracious culture, PwC Japan sets the bar high for what’s next in the firm’s strategy evolution

Just as technologies arm PwC consultants with tools to solve complex business challenges, the Technology Laboratory provides the enabling environment for all presentations, as regardless if executives spoke about audit and assurance, tax, advisory or consulting, they all leaned on a piece of technology that helped them connect the dots between art of the possible and the answer through the tangible.

As macroeconomic uncertainty persists, PwC has realized that instead of trying to fix issues outside its control, it is better to focus on its own transformation to prepare for addressing client challenges. We recognize there is still an opportunity for the firm to strengthen relationships with both internal and external stakeholders, including its alliance partners. Building a strong, common foundation for member firms is a crucial first step for integrated scaling. This involves connecting the Technology Laboratory and Experience Centers to deploy BXT and BMR at scale. Leveraging their experience with fixed-price contracts, they can then pivot toward fee-for-service models, providing the necessary frameworks for collaboration.

PwC Japan Group and its leadership set the bar high for its member firm counterparts in what it would take for the firms to work together more closely. Starting with better service line collaboration and portfolio offerings rollouts to establishing common KPIs and shared services are some of the prerequisites, and PwC Japan seems to have the ingredients to make it work all together. And while clients are less worried about how a firm operates and are more focused on solving their business and technology problems, working with a vendor that has its own house in order certainly makes it an easier partnership.

Building on last year’s theme of modernization, where Informatica highlighted innovations to fast-track migrations from legacy PowerCenter and Master Data Management (MDM) to Informatica Data Management Cloud (IDMC) in the cloud — accounting for over half of Informatica’s business — Informatica World 2025 in Las Vegas was all about agentic AI, and the crucial, yet still sometimes overlooked, role of data. With its ability to apply reasoning to handle more complex, multipart workflows, agentic AI has rapidly emerged as AI’s next frontier. Although agentic AI promises increased productivity, AI agents require a few key elements, including orchestration, a vast knowledge base and governance. With the wealth of metadata in CLAIRE, the AI engine powering IDMC, it was only a matter of time until Informatica used some of its core differentiators to push into the agentic AI space to not only craft a future for more autonomous data management but also to give customers the tools needed to build and orchestrate their own agents.

Informatica enters agentic AI race

Informatica employs two strategies relative to generative AI (GenAI): Informatica for GenAI, in which customers use IDMC’s data management capabilities to enable enterprises’ GenAI use cases; and GenAI from Informatica, where customers leverage Informatica’s GenAI offerings. Those products include CLAIRE Copilot, which entered general availability at the event, and CLAIRE GPT, which is used by over 550 clients to streamline tasks within IDMC such as pulling datasets and interacting with catalogs. On the annual conference’s 25th anniversary, Informatica formally entered the agentic AI space with a similar approach, giving customers the ability to consume AI agents within IDMC for more autonomous data management and a tool for letting customers build, manage and orchestrate their own AI agents.

• CLAIRE Agents: As part of the GenAI from Informatica strategy, Informatica introduced eight new agents to support tasks across the data life cycle. The agents, which are expected to begin preview in 2H25, are Data Quality, Data Discovery, Data Lineage, Data Ingestion, ETL [Extract, Transform Load], Modernization, Product Experience and Data Exploration. Architecturally speaking, these agents will round out the IDMC platform, sitting above the metadata system of intelligence, with CLAIRE Copilot and GPT acting as user experience (UX) overlays, where customers can interact with these agents.

Nearly every facet of IT has emerged as a prominent use case for GenAI, including data management, and customers are looking for ways to streamline more system-level tasks. Provided customers are prepared to move from manual — or even predictive and conversational AI engineering — to agentic AI, these new data management agents can help absorb a lot of back-end data management tasks, including developing the data pipelines and reducing some of the burden on the user, whose primary focus now becomes managing the agents.

• AI Agent Engineering: In agentic AI, the hyperscalers and SaaS vendors are racing to position as the AI control tower. As more vendors push into the PaaS space and the resulting AI agents convolute the applications layer, the question becomes, “Which set of vendors are positioned to abstract that complexity in a governed way?” At the event, Informatica entered the space with the introduction of AI Agent Engineering, a new tool to help users build their own agents using the popular low-code/no-code drag-and-drop experience. Additionally, AI Agent Hub, which acts as a marketplace within AI Agent Engineering, helps users find, manage and connect these agents, including not just Informatica’s CLAIRE agents but also the tools customers are already using to build agents, such as Amazon Bedrock, Azure OpenAI, Google Vertex and Salesforce’s Agentforce. When it comes to building and orchestrating AI agents, customers have a range of options, but one of the compelling things about Informatica entering this space is its ability to provide the federated governance and access controls around these agents without disrupting existing workflows. Governance remains one of the leading barriers to GenAI adoption, and while some overlap will always exist between the hyperscalers and data ISVs, the hyperscalers recognize Informatica’s reputation for helping customers build trust in their data and ability to apply that trust in a vendor-agnostic way.

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Ecosystem developments

As we often discuss, Informatica maintains a high degree of neutrality and can effectively work across a range of technology partners without introducing significant overlap. Maintaining its commitment to working within the technology ecosystem, Informatica announced new product integrations across its technology partners, including the following highlights.

• Microsoft: Microsoft’s play at the PaaS layer (e.g., Synapse, Power Platform) and ability to extend the Dynamics 365 data model to enable Customer 360 analytics make it an invaluable, somewhat unique partner to Informatica. Reaffirming Informatica’s commitment to Microsoft, CLAIRE Copilot was built using the Azure OpenAI Service. The launch of Microsoft Fabric last year seemed to mark a turning point in the alliance, as Informatica was granted status as an early design partner for Fabric, which has amassed 21,000 paid customers in the span of 18 months. Essentially, this status allows Informatica to make its Data Quality tool available as a native service, so customers can profile and assess data using Informatica as it gets ingested into Microsoft Fabric via the OneLake repository in real time. At the event, Informatica made Data Quality available (in public preview) as its own Fabric application. In addition, as part of its commitment to staying relevant within the Microsoft Fabric ecosystem, Informatica will start supporting Apache Iceberg in Microsoft Fabric, which is important as Microsoft looks to cement its commitment to open standards. These developments come as part of a new strategic agreement between Informatica and Microsoft, which implies not just a focus on R&D but also investment in the joint go-to-market approach. Having Informatica exist as a first-class citizen within the Microsoft stack could make the case for customers to explore other components of IDMC, creating deeper synergies with services partners like KPMG that use Informatica and Microsoft Fabric, both internally and externally for data modernization and transformation.
• Salesforce*: Though Informatica and Salesforce technically had a preexisting alliance, the partnership was formalized at Informatica World 2025 with the announcement that IDMC will be integrated with Salesforce’s Agentforce. Specifically, Informatica plans to deliver MDM SaaS with Agentforce, effectively putting the 360-degree wrapper around agents that customers build in Salesforce’s platform. As previously mentioned, customers will also be able consume Agentforce via Informatica AI Agent Engineering upon availability later this year. Salesforce sees Informatica as a key player in the market and is looking to strengthen its play in data management and governance in accordance with Agentforce, so this partnership is a win for Salesforce. In turn, Informatica seems to recognize the role Agentforce will play in the AI ecosystem for sales and service use cases, and it will be interesting to see how this partnership progresses and if Salesforce ends up joining Informatica’s seven other, more established technology partners.

On the services side, Informatica continues to cement its value across nine core global systems integrator (GSI) partners, which collectively staff 30,000 Informatica professionals. In 2024, Informatica earned 15,000 certifications, up over 20% year-to-year. Vendor sentiment and our own conversations with enterprise IT decision makers suggest that for AI to effectively scale, data needs to be in the cloud. As such, modernization will continue to be a big focus for Informatica and its partners through 2025. This includes AI-powered modernization and potentially using the new CLAIRE Agents, specifically Modernization, to help migrate on-premises data to IDMC. When it comes to agentic AI, Informatica’s new innovations should open new doors for services partners to not only modernize data management tasks ahead of GenAI deployments but also help clients create new custom agents (using AI Agent Engineering), including those tailored to certain industries, and make them relevant within existing workflows.

Between the technology partners and GSIs, Informatica works with a robust ecosystem of partners in a triparty approach, where resources from a hyperscaler, GSI and Informatica are brought together to help customers modernize their data faster and, by default, hasten AI’s time to value. When we survey and speak to alliance decision makers at IT services firms, data management comes up as one of the top areas for partner-led growth, signaling to the ecosystem that they will continue to invest in resources to guide conversations with customers with the technology maturity to address the data foundations ahead of GenAI.

Conclusion

Agentic AI has a lot of promise but also some challenges. The proliferation of AI agents will create more best-of-breed complexity — which we know customers are trying to move away from — and heighten concerns around data privacy and governance. Informatica’s move into the agentic AI space with both CLAIRE Agents and AI Agent Engineering is certainly in step with the market; we all know AI agents do not exist in silos, so Informatica’s ability to work within its ecosystem of tech partners and connect agents in a vendor-neutral way is particularly compelling. Meanwhile, Informatica’s robust engineering relationships with the hyperscalers, as evidenced by Informatica’s Data Quality integration with Microsoft Fabric, will continue to elevate its standing with the big GSIs and foster a compelling triparty alliance approach focused on helping customers get their data ready for AI.

*After Informatica World, on May 27, Informatica entered into an agreement to be acquired by Salesforce. Informatica will continue to operate as a stand-alone entity until the acquisition closes, likely in Salesforce’s FY27. Please see TBR’s Salesforce coverage for further insights.

‘AI can be a knowledge management accelerator, but only if well-fed by an enterprise’s own data’

In February TBR met with two AI leaders in Fujitsu’s European Platform Business to better understand the company’s approach to the AI market, its evolving AI capabilities and offerings, and what we can expect as 2025 unfolds. Maria Levina, AI Business analyst, and Karl Hausdorf, head of AI Business, gave a detailed presentation focused primarily on the European market. The following reflects both that briefing and TBR’s ongoing research and analysis of Fujitsu, the company’s partners and peers, and the overall AI landscape.
 
One highlight that illustrates many facets of Fujitsu’s approach to AI was Levina and Hausdorf’s description of Fujitsu’s customers’ choices between “bring your own data” and “bring your own AI.” The first allows more AI-mature customers to bring their data into a Fujitsu-provided on-premises solution with full support for scaling, maintaining hardware and software, and updating, as needed.
 
The second allows customers to run their own AI stack on a Fujitsu “validated and optimized” platform, developed and maintained by Fujitsu and select technology partners. Critical, in TBR’s view, is Fujitsu’s positioning of these options as responsive to clients’ needs, as determined by all AI stakeholders within an enterprise, including IT, AI and business leaders.
 
Levina and Hausdorf explained, “Together, with our ecosystem of partners, we’re committed to unlock the potential of generative AI for our clients” through “on-premises data sovereign, sustainable private GPT and AI solutions,” focused on “rapid ROI.” Fujitsu is not approaching clients with a technology solution, but rather with options on how to address and solve business problems. As the Fujitsu team said, “Understand the why, know the what, and co-create the how.” The Fujitsu team also noted that the company’s industry expertise resides in the processes and workflows unique and/or critical to an industry.
 

‘Maintaining control of data means owning your AI in the future’

Before diving into Fujitsu’s AI offerings, the Fujitsu team laid out their understanding of the European market, sharing data the company collected around AI adoption, use of AI platforms, and barriers to growth (in Fujitsu’s phrasing, “progress-limiting factors,” which is perhaps a more positive spin on the usual list of barriers and challenges). Fujitsu surveyed or spoke with 400 data and IT professionals across six European countries, and the results indicated that overcoming legacy mindsets continues to be a major impediment to adopting and harnessing the value of AI.
 
TBR’s November 2024 Voice of the Customer Research similarly noted challenges in Europe with “the lack of engagement from employees who are being asked to change.” The Fujitsu team noted that change management, therefore, had to involve all AI stakeholders, including “IT people, business people and AI people” within an enterprise.
 
In TBR’s experience, IT services companies and consultancies continue to find new constituents for change management at their clients as the promise — and disruption — of AI becomes more widespread, reinforcing Fujitsu’s strategy of bringing change management to all AI stakeholders. Lastly, the Fujitsu team noted that within European clients, expectations around AI have heightened, especially as AI initiatives have launched across multiple business units. Again, Fujitsu’s research and TBR’s Voice of the Customer Research align around ROI expectations as AI matures.
 
The Fujitsu team introduced their AI platform by delineating the key performance indicators they believe a successful platform must have: scaling, performance and speed, simplicity, energy efficiency, AI services in data centers, and GPUs.
 
Although TBR is not in a position to evaluate the technological strengths, completeness or complexity of Fujitsu’s platform, the expansive KPIs indicate Fujitsu has considered not only the IT needs behind an AI deployment but also the larger business factors, particularly the financial impacts. Levina and Hausdorf then dove into the details, including the two customer options described above (bring your own data and bring your own AI). They discussed how Fujitsu offers consulting around the technical and business implications of AI platforms and solutions, including an “AI Test Drive,” which allows clients to test AI solutions before investing in new technologies, large language models (LLMs) or other AI components.
 
Notably for TBR, Fujitsu’s presentation extensively highlighted the company’s AI alliance partners, including Intel, NVIDIA, AMD and NetApp, as well as a slew of LLM providers, demonstrating an appreciation for the collaborative and ecosystem-dependent nature of AI at the enterprise level. The Fujitsu team also stressed the European nature of its AI strategy and platform.
 
European clients, Fujitsu noted, had specific requirements related to the European Union’s (EU) General Data Protection Regulation and the EU AI Act, as well as a preference for on-premises solutions. Some of the use cases Levina and Hausdorf described included a law firm using Fujitsu-enabled AI solutions to analyze case data, contracts, corporate and public legal documents, and multiple deployments of Fujitsu-enabled private GPTs.

Additional observations

• Fujitsu remains focused on targeting customers already aligned with the company around AI, a strategy that TBR believes speeds ROI and increases client retention.
• In contrast to some peers in the IT services market, Fujitsu has capabilities across the entire AI technology stack — hardware, software and service — which Levina and Hausdorf called “highly appealing,” especially to European clients.
• Levina and Hausdorf made two comments that, in TBR’s view, neatly sum up AI at present: “AI can be a knowledge management accelerator, but only if well-fed by an enterprise’s own data” and “maintaining control of data means owning your AI in the future.”

Fujitsu’s AI prowess makes it an invaluable partner

TBR has reported extensively on Fujitsu’s evolving AI capabilities and offerings, noting in a special report in May 2024: “TBR appreciates that Fujitsu’s combination of compute power and proven AI expertise makes the company a significant competitor and/or alliance partner for nearly every player fighting to turn GenAI [generative AI] hype into revenue.
 
“Second, Fujitsu’s vision of ‘converging technologies’ aligns exceptionally well with the more tectonic trends TBR has been observing in the technology space, indicating that Fujitsu’s market positioning is more strategic than transactional or opportunistic.” Add in Fujitsu’s deepening experience in delivering AI solutions to AI clients, and TBR continues to see tremendous near-term opportunity and growth for Fujitsu and its ecosystem partners.

Executing on its Collective Strategy through integrated scale and backed by robust strategic partnerships and platform-enabled services positions KPMG to remain a formidable competitor in the transforming professional services market

KPMG Global Chairman and CEO Bill Thomas kicked off the firm’s 2025 Global Analyst Summit by reinforcing the firm’s mission to be “the most trusted and trustworthy professional services firm.” As we have discussed at length across TBR’s professional and IT services research, firms like KPMG trade on trust with clients, alliance partners and employees. Putting a stake in the ground from the get-go provided Thomas and KPMG’s executives a strong foundation to rely on during the next two days as trust — at the human and technology level — was an underlying theme during presentations and demos.
As a member of the Big Four, KPMG has brand permission and a breadth of services that are relevant to nearly every role in any enterprise. As the firm executes on its Collective Strategy, TBR believes KPMG will accelerate the scale and completeness of its offerings, building on a solid foundation and expanding the gaps between KPMG and other consulting-led, technology-enabled professional services providers. ​
 
KPMG’s global solutions — Connected, Powered, Trusted and Elevate — which resonate with clients and technology partners, have now been brought together into one transformation framework under KPMG Velocity, providing KPMG’s professionals with clear insight into the firm’s strengths and strategy, and underpinning, in the near future, all KPMG’s transformation engagements. KPMG Velocity’s evolving strategy will challenge KPMG’s leaders to execute on the promise of that transformation during the next wave of macroeconomic pressures, talent management battles and technology revolutions. At the same time, KPMG’s leaders recognize that their priorities are transforming the firm’s go-to-market approach, unlocking the power of the firm’s people, reimagining ways of working, and innovating capabilities and service enhancements. ​
 
Success in executing these priorities, in TBR’s view, will come as KPMG shifts from building a foundation to scaling alongside the growing needs of its clients and as the era of GenAI presents yet another opportunity and challenge. Striking the right balance between elevating the potential of GenAI as a value creator and accounting for commercial and pricing model implications will test the durability of KPMG’s engagement and delivery frameworks. ​
 
Although the firm has placed in motion many of the aforementioned investments over the past 12 to 18 months, the one opportunity that is changing relates to speed. As one enterprise buyer recently explained to TBR: “GenAI will force all services vendors to change. The [ones] who [will] be [the] most successful will be [those] who do it fast.” With speed comes risk — which KPMG fully acknowledges and is why KPMG Velocity’s offering is a differentiator for the firm in the market. With KPMG Velocity, all of KPMG’s multidisciplinary and heritage risk and regulatory considerations have been embedded across each transformation journey to ensure clients can remain compliant and avoid the pitfalls that can often arise during transformation. ​
Continuing the firm’s presentation, Thomas outlined KPMG’s evolving Collective Strategy, noting that the firm is 18 months into its latest iteration focused on “accelerating trust and growth.” Among the key enablers of achieving this goal is KPMG’s collapsing of its organizational structure from 150 country-specific member firms to a cluster of 30 to 40 regionally organized “economic units.” TBR views this pivot as the most natural evolution of KPMG’s operating model. For the Big Four, the biggest challenge is how to demonstrate value through integrated scale. Once completed, the reorganization will allow KPMG to minimize such disruption and better compete for globally sourced opportunities from what the firm calls “transactions to transformation” and for large, multi-year, geographically dispersed enterprise, function and foundational transformations.
 
Following Thomas’ presentation, Carl Carande, KPMG U.S. & global lead, Advisory, and Regina Mayor, global head of Clients & Markets, amplified KPMG’s strategy, reinforcing the importance of the firm’s people, technology partners and technology — with AI the catalyst and change agent of success. For example, Carande recognized the technology relationships are changing in two ways. Relationships are becoming more exclusive, and the multipartner alliance framework offers a multiplier power — themes TBR has discussed at length throughout our Ecosystem Intelligence research stream.
 
Although KPMG continues to manage a robust network of alliance partners, highlighting its seven strategic partners — Google Cloud, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow and Workday — solidifies its recognition of these vendors’ position throughout the ecosystem. Mayor expanded on Carande’s discussion around alliances through an industry lens, describing “alliance partners leaning in with KPMG” as they realize efforts to only sell the product will be insufficient. Meanwhile, on the KPMG side, alliance sales partners help figure out how to penetrate sector-specific alliance relationships.
 
Taking such a systematic approach across KPMG’s 7 sectors (with the desire to expand these to 14) will allow the firm to demonstrate value and support its evolving Collective Strategy to act as a globally integrated firm. Additionally, new offerings like KPMG Velocity (discussed in depth on Slide 6) will arm KPMG’s consultants with the necessary collective knowledge management to serve global clients locally, further supporting the firm’s strategy.
 
One could argue that many of KPMG’s steps, including launching partner-enabled industry IP, reinforcing trust, developing regionally organized operations, outlining a select few strategic partners, and investing in platform-enabled service delivery capabilities, resonate with the moves taken by many of its Big Four and large IT services peers. We see two differences.
 
First, KPMG is laser-focused on exactly which of the strategies above to amplify, rather than taking a trial-and-error approach. Second, it is about timing. Some of KPMG’s peers have tried these strategies for some time, with limited success because of poor execution or timing. We believe that as the professional services market goes through its once-in-a-century transformation, KPMG has an opportunity to ride the wave, provided it maintains internal consensus and executes on its operational and commercial model evolution with minimal disruption.
 

 

KPMG’s evolution will largely stem from orchestrating alliances with seven strategic technology partners

At the event, KPMG asserted the role of tech alliance partners in building the “firm of the future.” Although the firm works with a range of ISVs, a targeted focus on the firm’s seven strategic technology partners has become key to the company’s growth profile — with 50% of its consulting business alliance-enabled in the U.S. — and, as the case of previous audit client SAP shows, KPMG has been able to overcome barriers to ultimately help clients get the most out of technology. The firm’s approach of leading with client outcomes first and technology second is unchanged, but prioritizing a tech-enabled go-to-market approach will support KPMG’s position in the market behind two major trends.
 
The first trend is the overall maturation in partner alliance structures we see from the cloud vendors. Changes in programmatic structure, including bringing sales and partner delivery closer together, and an all-around shift in how partners are viewed among historically siloed vendors, could act as enablers for KPMG’s newer capabilities, including Velocity. Second, there is a big paradigm shift underway on where the value of tech exists. Increasingly, we see the firm moving down the stack, a trend enabled by agentic AI and customers’ need to harness their own data and build new applications. Across the Big Seven, there is no shortage of innovation. As the value of AI shifts down the technology stack, KPMG can leverage the technology to deliver business outcomes to clients.
 
To fully describe KPMG’s evolving technology alliance strategy and the firm’s growing capabilities, KPMG leaders hosted a panel discussion that included leaders from Microsoft, SAP, Salesforce and KPMG clients. Todd Lohr, KPMG’s head of Ecosystems for Advisory, set the stage by saying the firm views ecosystems as more than simply a collection of one-to-one alliances, but ecosystems are, instead, many-to-many relationships, an idea TBR has increasingly heard expressed by consultancies, IT services companies, hyperscalers and software vendors.
 
Having leaders from technology partners on stage to display a very common example of a tech stack — with SAP as the system of record (SOR), Salesforce in the front office, and Microsoft as the platform with Copilot — was a strong way to depict the “many-to-many relationships” structure and KPMG’s role in orchestrating the ecosystem, especially in scenarios where some of these ISVs may not have a native integration and/or formal collaboration with one another. Lohr noted that KPMG “needs to show up understanding how complicated multiparty relationships work before showing up and working them out ad hoc at the client.” That direct acknowledgment of the challenges inherent in multiparty alliances is decidedly not something TBR consistently hears from KPMG’s peers and partners.

KPMG moves away from vendor agnosticism

One of the most important takeaways for TBR from the summit was KPMG’s willingness, in the right circumstances, to aggressively abandon the typical agnostic approach to recommending technologies and instead make a specific technology recommendation where there is a deep understanding of the client needs. One client example highlighted this new(ish) approach. When the client reached out for advice on a sales-enablement platform, KPMG did not take an agnostic approach and, instead, told the client Salesforce was the only choice, based on KPMG’s evaluation.
 
Part of KPMG’s proposal rested on reworking the client’s processes so Salesforce could work as much out of the box as possible, limiting costs and customizations. As KPMG leaders described it, this reflected the opposite of most consultancies’ (and enterprises’) usual approach of forcing the business processes to work with a new technology. In a competitive bidding process, the lead KPMG partner, according to the client, answered questions on the Salesforce software and implementation issues without turning to others on the KPMG team, demonstrating mastery of Salesforce and the client’s IT environment that reassured the client about KPMG’s recommendations. Further, the client expressly did not want customization layers on top of Salesforce, knowing that would be more expensive over time.
 
Notably, the “fairly comprehensive implementation,” according to the client, took less than a year, including what the client said was “a lot of investment with KPMG in change management.” Recalling best practices TBR has heard in other engagements, the client team and KPMG called the Salesforce implementation Project Leap Frogs to avoid the word “transformation,” enabled champions across the enterprise, and held firm to the approach of making minimal customizations. In discussions with TBR, KPMG leaders confirmed that not being technology agnostic was contrary to the firm’s usual practice but was becoming more common.
 
Reinforcing that notion, a KPMG leader told TBR that the firm had lost a deal after it recommended Oracle and said SAP was not the right fit. The client selected SAP (for nontechnical reasons) but later awarded, without a competitive bidding process, Oracle-specific work to KPMG after noting respect for the firm’s honesty and integrity.

KPMG showcases client-centric innovation in action

ServiceNow implementation

A client story featuring a ServiceNow implementation that brought cost savings and efficiencies to the client notably emphasized change management, a core KPMG consulting capability that is sometimes overshadowed by technologies. The client described the “really good change management program that KPMG brought” as well as the emphasis on a clear data and technology core, out-of-the-box ServiceNow implementation, and limited customizations. In TBR’s view, KPMG’s approach with this engagement likely benefited considerably from the firm’s decades-long relationship with the client, playing to one of KPMG’s strengths, which the firm’s leaders returned to repeatedly in discussions with TBR: Trusted partnerships with clients create long-standing relationships and client loyalty.

Reimagining leaders

One client story centered on a five-day “reimagining leaders” engagement at the Lakehouse facility, conducted by the KPMG Ignition team. Surprisingly, KPMG included an immersive session with an unrelated KPMG team working on an unrelated client’s project that had little overlap with the business or technology needs of the leadership engagement client.
 
According to the KPMG Ignition team, the firm showcased how KPMG works, how innovation occurs at the working level, and how KPMG creates with clients, giving them confidence in KPMG’s breadth and depth of capabilities. Echoing sentiments TBR has heard during more than a decade of visiting transformation and innovation centers, KPMG Ignition leaders said that being enclosed on the Lakehouse campus made it easier for clients to be fully present throughout the engagement and removed from the distractions of day-to-day work.
 
KPMG kept the client in the dark about what to expect from the engagement, which prevented any biased expectations from creeping in before the engagement had even started. KPMG Ignition leaders shared additional insights, noting that it was a pilot program for rising leaders at the client, providing an immersive experience that showcased the power of the KPMG partnership.
 
Throughout the five-day immersion at KPMG Lakehouse, participants learned how to apply the methodologies that fuel innovation at KPMG while staying focused on one theme: reimagining leadership of the overall company and of the participants as next-generation leaders, as well as reimagining leadership capabilities at every level of the organization.
 
KPMG equipped the client’s leaders with methodologies emphasizing storytelling, design thinking and strategic insights, and strengthened the client’s culture by fostering high-performing, collaborative teams.
 
One final comment from the Ignition Center leaders: This pilot program “highlighted the fact that AI can be viewed as a wellness play across the agency if you free up capacity and understand what can be achieved.” Based on the use case and sidebar discussions TBR had with KPMG Ignition leaders, we believe Ignition Centers continue to evolve, although the basics remain the same: Get clients into a dedicated space outside their own office, use design thinking, and focus on business and innovation and leadership and change, not on technology.

The art of the possible

A final client story, presented on the main stage, wove together the themes of AI, transformation and trust. The client, a chemicals manufacturer and retailer, said KPMG consistently shared “what’s possible,” essentially making innovation an ongoing effort, not a one-off aspect of the relationship.
 
The client added that his company and KPMG had “shared values … and we understand each others’ cultures,” in part reinforced by KPMG dedicating the same team to the client during a multiyear engagement.
 
In TBR’s view, KPMG’s decision to highlight this client reinforced everything KPMG leaders had been saying during the summit: Relationships, built on consistent delivery and continually coming to the client with ideas and innovations, plus a commitment to the teaming aspect of the engagement, are KPMG’s superpower. Notably, this client was not a flashy tech company, a massive financial institution or a well-known government agency, and the work KPMG did was not cutting-edge or highly specialized but rather core KPMG capabilities — in short, what KPMG does well.

Velocity and GenAI: KPMG’s client-first approach to AI adoption and transformation

KPMG dedicated the second day of the analyst summit to AI, a decision that reflected the firm’s overall approach: Business decisions come first, enabled by technology. Supporting the firm’s AI strategy, KPMG has developed Velocity, a knowledge platform, AI recommendation and support engine underpinned by one universal method that pulls together every capability, offering and resource across the firm for the KPMG workforce. According to KPMG leaders, Velocity reinforces the firm’s multidisciplinary model and will become the primary way KPMG brings itself to clients. ​

In addition to sharing knowledge across the global firm, Velocity will help KPMG’s clients find the right AI journey that matches their ambitions — whether it be Enterprise, Function or Foundation — by allowing them to select a strategic objective they are trying to achieve, which function(s) they want to transform, and which technology platforms they want to transform on. The platform also reaffirms the firm’s acknowledgment of data’s role in AI. In fact, part of the rationale for Velocity was bringing the data modernization and AI business together while maintaining a focus on a sole client outcome. This means KPMG does not care whether customers build their data foundation with a hyperscaler or internally; as one leader in the AI Journey breakout session said, it is just about “helping clients do what they want to do.”​

Velocity includes preconfigured journeys based on specific client needs, as developed, understood and addressed in all of KPMG previous engagements. Similar to many consultancies, KPMG begins engagements by developing an understanding of clients’ strategic needs and issues, rather than their technology stack. (TBR comment: easy to say, hard to do, especially when a firm has practices built around specific technologies). ​

Velocity is designed to add value to client engagements (including describing, calculating and being accountable). It will also bring a “tremendous amount of information” and is “highly tailorable,” according to a KPMG leader, who also noted that the platform’s adoption, use and usefulness over time will be key. KPMG leaders said the core aspects of AI — even agentic AI — are all the same, separated only by planning and orchestration. For example, KPMG’s AI Workbench underpins how it is bringing agents and AI-enabled services to its clients and its people. Velocity, then, is a KPMG offering where every step is focused on achieving client outcomes, which comes back to understanding clients’ key business issues, not simply their technology stack. ​

The launch of Velocity internally (starting in March 2025) into its largest member firms brings to life KPMG’s approach to AI. KPMG expects its member firms to be able to start unlocking the power of Velocity beginning in May, and will launch Velocity externally later in the year. Amid caution on the client side around the adoption and implementation of AI technologies, KPMG’s David Rowlands, head of AI, discussed how KPMG wants to be client zero around AI, helping to ease clients’ ethics and security concerns by working through experimentation and into adoption and scale. Rowlands highlighted the firm’s attention to knowledge and need to fully benefit from AI. Training around AI, including the definition of AI and how to use it; creating trust within AI; and learning effective AI prompts also fit within this strategy, enabling both KPMG and clients to effectively embed AI across people and operational strategies.

Velocity, AI and the future of audits

Three other AI-centric comments from KPMG leaders stood out for TBR:

• With AI, “the road to value is paved with human behavior and change,” according to Rowlands, reflecting the firm’s emphasis on the business over the technology and the importance of change management — a core KPMG consulting strength.
• Rowlands also noted that AI is a critical national infrastructure, dependent on energy, connectivity and networks, and should be considered a national investment priority and national security issue. In TBR’s view, framing AI this way — not as just a tool or another service to be sold — adds credibility to KPMG’s AI efforts.
• According to Per Edin, KPMG’s AI leader, “ROI is clear and documented, but still not enough adoption to be as measurable as desired.” In TBR’s view, Edin’s sentiments track closely with TBR’s Voice of the Customer and Voice of the Partner research, which have repeatedly shown that interest and investments in AI have outpaced adoption, particularly at scale.

In a breakout session, KPMG walked through the firm’s well-established KPMG Clara platform, a tool designed to help the firm complete its audits more quickly and accurately. In essence, KPMG creates a digital twin of an organization, reflecting the firm’s understanding of where AI can be applied. KPMG Clara Transaction Scoring enables auditors to deliver what the firm calls “audit evidence” and note “outlier” transactions. According to KPMG leaders, “AI agents perform audit procedures and document results for human review, just like junior staff.”
 
Critically, KPMG Clara audits every transaction, not just a sample of transactions, increasing the likelihood of catching problems, issues and outliers. By flagging high-risk transactions, KPMG can deploy professionals to focus on solving real problems rather than adjudicating false positives or meaningless issues. In TBR’s view, this represents the proverbial “higher-value task” long-promised by robotic process automation, AI and analytics.
 
When pressed by TBR, KPMG leaders said clients were not looking for rate cuts but rather for higher-quality audits and new insights into their operations. Importantly, clients also expect to spend less time on an audit, freeing up professionals’ time: The client can do what they do, and KPMGers can stay focused on reflected issues and generate new insights.
 
TBR remains a bit skeptical, but if clients do not expect a rate cut when KPMG deploys AI to speed up the audit process and instead expect to spend less time internally on what should be a higher-quality audit, TBR considers that a fantastic way to position AI while also reducing KPMG’s professionals’ time. There are two unanswered questions: What happens to the apprenticeship model, in which less-experienced KPMG professionals learn the art, not the science, of audit? And, in a few years, will 95,000 professionals conduct 400,000 audits (twice the current number) or will 50,000 professionals (half the current staff) complete 200,000 audits?
 
Regardless, as the company rolls out internally developed generative AI (GenAI) tools, the learning and experience captured through the firm’s implementation and change management process will undoubtedly be integrated into customer engagements involving third-party solutions. With SAP and Salesforce in attendance, KPMG zeroed in on each vendor’s AI strategy and how the firm plans to support it. To focus on Salesforce, Lohr echoed Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff in calling Agentforce the most successful Salesforce launch ever, which suggests a recognition from KPMG leadership of Salesforce’s agentic AI strategy.
 
For its part, KPMG highlighted the recent launch of an Agentforce Incubator, an experimental experience that can be delivered to clients from any location — a client site, Salesforce event or a KPMG office — to ignite the ideation stage and begin exploring the road map from proof of concept to production. During one-on-one conversations, TBR explored KPMG’s view of its role in the agentic AI, and we found it to be both pragmatic and valuable — similar to how the firm must be opinionated in broader digital transformation engagements.
 
KPMG’s journey to becoming an AI orchestrator will require the firm to take a stance on a vendor-by-vendor basis and arrive on-site with a preconceived understanding of the best path forward for clients given their goals. In addition to having an opinion, KPMG also recognizes it must help facilitate the road maps it lays out to clients, which will involve a heavy change management component, as well as a more technical design and development element. With the Agentforce example, once a targeted business outcome is established, an AI agent needs to be designed and developed to achieve the outcome. In many cases, a customer may lack the internal technical resources necessary to build the agent and tackle the problem. As KPMG avoids vendor agnosticism, the company can focus on building out technical resources with the vendors it chooses, building deeper benches with technical training associated with its strategic partners.

KPMG’s Lakehouse offers unique setting for analyst event

As it did less than 18 months ago when KPMG broke from the traditional analyst event style, the firm did it again. Hosting 62 analysts and dozens of global executives, clients and partners at a flagship Lakehouse facility for two days of both formal and informal interactions, presentations, client use cases and demos, KPMG demonstrated agility in terms of the delivery and engagement format, yet, with a steady hand, continued to execute on its vision with its global solutions — Connected, Powered, Trusted and Elevate — and proven IP, methods and enablers coming together through Velocity. ​
 
KPMG held one-on-one sessions between analysts and executives midway through the first day so that executives were present and engaged. Additionally, KPMG saved the all-about-AI-and-nothing-else sessions for the second day, which came off as, “We get AI is important, but we are also realistic and keeping our heads on straight and not being ‘me too, me too’ about AI.” KPMG senior executives sat in on both the client case study and platform breakout sessions. Subtle message to analysts: This stuff matters enough across the firm to be worth KPMG partners’ time even if it is not in their area.

Conclusion

As a member of the Big Four, KPMG has brand permission and a breadth of services that are relevant to nearly every role in any enterprise. As the firm executes on its Collective Strategy, TBR believes KPMG will accelerate the scale and completeness of its offerings, building on a solid foundation and expanding the gaps between KPMG and other consulting-led, technology-enabled professional services providers. ​

KPMG’s global solutions — Connected, Powered, Trusted and Elevate — which resonate with clients and technology partners, have now been brought together into one transformation framework under KPMG Velocity, providing KPMG’s professionals with clear insight into the firm’s strengths and strategy, and underpinning, in the near future, all KPMG’s transformation engagements. KPMG Velocity’s evolving strategy will challenge KPMG’s leaders to execute on the promise of that transformation during the next wave of macroeconomic pressures, talent management battles and technology revolutions. At the same time, KPMG’s leaders recognize that their priorities are transforming the firm’s go-to-market approach, unlocking the power of the firm’s people, reimagining ways of working, and innovating capabilities and service enhancements. ​

Success in executing these priorities, in TBR’s view, will come as KPMG shifts from building a foundation to scaling alongside the growing needs of its clients and as the era of GenAI presents yet another opportunity and challenge. Striking the right balance between elevating the potential of GenAI as a value creator and accounting for commercial and pricing model implications will test the durability of KPMG’s engagement and delivery frameworks. ​

Although the firm has placed in motion many of the aforementioned investments over the past 12 to 18 months, the one opportunity that is changing relates to speed. As one enterprise buyer recently explained to TBR: “GenAI will force all services vendors to change. The [ones] who [will] be [the] most successful will be [those] who do it fast.” With speed comes risk — which KPMG fully acknowledges and is why KPMG Velocity’s offering is a differentiator for the firm in the market. With KPMG Velocity, all of KPMG’s multidisciplinary and heritage risk and regulatory considerations have been embedded across each transformation journey to ensure clients can remain compliant and avoid the pitfalls that can often arise during transformation. ​

Special report contributors: Catie Merrill, Senior Analyst; Kelly Lesizcka, Senior Analyst; Alex Demeule, Analyst; Boz Hristov, Principal Analyst