KPMG will spend $100 million over the next four years on its enterprise AI services.
It’s part of an artificial intelligence (AI) partnership between the professional services giant and Google Cloud, Steve Chase, vice chair of AI and innovation for KPMG, said in an interview with Reuters posted Wednesday (Nov. 20).
While part of the $100 million will cover payments to Google, most will be spent on in-house projects that use Google’s tech, Chase said, such as developing AI agents and training KPMG staff to become proficient in the technology.
The Reuters report notes that while Wall Street is waiting on the tech sector to show it can offer a return on the billions it has invested in AI, professional services companies are among the first businesses to benefit from the technology, with businesses turning to accounting and consulting firms for guidance on implementing AI.
“We strongly are in the camp that it is moving from [proof of concept] and experimentation to scaling,” Chase said. “We believe that professional services is going through the largest transformation that it will likely ever go through.”
He pointed to a poll of business leaders conducted by KPMG, which showed that 50% of companies planned to spend $100 million on AI projects in the next 12 months, with 20% planning to invest at least $250 million.
Chase added that bookings for KPMG’s Google Cloud-related services have increased tenfold over the last two years. It has led the company to seek other cloud providers, announcing last year a $2 billion, five-year commitment to expand AI and cloud services via Microsoft.
KPMG’s findings are in line with research by PYMNTS Intelligence showing that 78% of chief financial officers (CFOs) plan to increase their investments in generative AI (GenAI).
“CFOs are turning to GenAI for medium-complexity tasks, such as financial reporting, data visualizations and forecasting,” PYMNTS wrote last week. “Consider 60% of CFOs said their companies are using GenAI for these tasks, marking a change from earlier this year, when many relied on AI for more routine activities, such as invoice processing or basic data entry.”
The share of companies using AI for medium-impact functions has climbed from 35% in March to 45% in June, a sign that companies are moving beyond basic applications and starting to integrate AI more strategically into their operations. This broader adoption of GenAI shows confidence in the technology’s potential to bring value other than simple task automation.
