OpenAI and Anthropic press into £740bn consulting market as Big Four scramble for AI expertise

TL;DR:

• A Telegraph deep-dive reports that OpenAI and Anthropic have both this month launched joint ventures offering consultancy-style advice to enterprises, directly targeting the $1 trillion (£740 billion) global management-consulting market.
• The Big Four — EY, KPMG, Deloitte and PwC — are now posting more AI-role vacancies than auditor roles in the UK on a rolling 12-month basis, with all five major consultancies (plus McKinsey and BCG) actively hiring “Forward Deployed Engineers” pioneered by Palantir.
• A recent EY report was flagged by GPTZero as showing “all indications of AI slop”, containing fake citations and made-up data — the kind of error the consultancies are simultaneously trying to sell governance advice on.

The story crystallises a structural shift Resultsense has tracked through the Tomoro AI acquisition, Accenture’s $1 billion Faculty deal and Grant Thornton’s Cinven private-equity recap: the UK professional-services pyramid is being rebuilt around AI capability rather than billable-hour leverage, with the labs themselves now competing for the same enterprise contracts.

Context and Background

Pip White, Anthropic’s UK chief, framed the move as additive — “plenty of opportunity in the market for everyone” — but unnamed consultancy sources told the Telegraph the new ventures are “definitely a direct play against the traditional consulting firms”. OpenAI’s Tomoro AI acquisition is the clearest signal: 150 staff based in the City and Edinburgh, with clients including Tesco and Virgin Atlantic, positioned to deliver board-level strategy and rapid technical builds in the same engagement.

The Forward Deployed Engineer pattern is the part that most cleanly disrupts Big Four economics. FDEs are paid up to $260,000 (£192,000) in the US, Anthropic offers up to $300,000 (£222,000) plus equity, while Big Four graduate salaries have stagnated. Recruiter James O’Dowd’s blunt summary: “It’s going to be far easier for Anthropic to just hire the best consulting partner in some niche and deliver that service far more cheaply because they haven’t got to pay all the people in the teams that still exist within these larger consulting firms.”

The partnership-structure problem cited by Allan Koltin — partners resisting big AI investment that would dent annual payouts — is precisely why Grant Thornton sold to Cinven in 2024 and why other UK mid-market firms are exploring private-equity capital. The EY “AI slop” incident is the embarrassing inverse: caught publishing the output of the technology you are trying to sell governance advice on.

Looking Forward

For UK firms outside the Big Four — particularly mid-market consultancies and in-house transformation teams — the immediate read is that procurement choices will increasingly include the labs themselves as direct competitors, not just Big Four AI practices. Expect a wave of follow-on FDE acquisitions through 2026 as the consultancies try to close the delivery-engineering gap before the labs lock in flagship clients. The Big Four’s defence — sector depth, restructuring DNA, governance trust — is real but will be tested against pricing pressure from organisations that can hire any consulting partner they need at lab salaries.