Dive Brief:
- Big Four accounting and consulting firm KPMG is looking to accelerate its growth as a provider of technology consulting services with a stake in artificial intelligence startup Rhino.AI.
- The companies announced last week that KPMG made a minority equity investment in Rhino.AI, whose AI-enabled platform is designed to help clients save time and money when upgrading legacy information technology systems. The financial terms of the deal, which builds on an existing alliance, were not disclosed.
- “We very much see this as a growth engine for us,” Marcus Murph, head of CIO Advisory at KPMG, said in an interview. “There are still a tremendous number of large enterprises that have significant technology debt.”
Dive Insight:
Global consulting firms have been using AI to boost internal capabilities while also enhancing the services they provide to enterprise clients, as previously reported by CFO Dive sister publication CIO Dive.
In January, Deloitte announced that it was rolling out an internal generative AI platform, PairD, to 75,000 employees across Europe and the Middle East. Last September, Ernst & Young launched an AI adoption platform called EY.ai, which involved a $1.4 billion investment.
In October, KPMG and Rhino.AI announced a collaboration aimed at “revolutionizing legacy portfolio modernization.”
Rhino.AI facilitates the “seamless migration of applications and workflows from traditional legacy systems and the scalable generation of new applications on modern Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) environments,” the startup said in a Thursday press release.
Following the alliance last year, KPMG and Rhino.AI are now helping “multiple companies modernize their legacy estates with a faster time to value and lower costs,” according to the release.
“KPMG quickly recognized the significant time and cost savings our platform and joint partnership delivers,” Rhino.AI CEO Adam Branch said in an interview. “Now, they are eager to leverage our solutions across their entire portfolio and deliver value to our joint clients.”
The startup’s technology accelerates the migration from legacy systems to modern platforms like those provided by Microsoft and ServiceNow, he said.
“Typically, a ServiceNow migration would require a large team at KPMG. With our platform, that team size can be reduced by half or more,” Branch noted. “This reduction in manpower directly translates to significant cost savings for CFOs and a faster time to value, which is invaluable for business leaders.”
Both Branch and Murph declined to comment on the terms of the companies’ deal.
KPMG generated $36 billion in total revenues during fiscal 2023, an increase of 8% over the prior year, according to results announced last December. The company’s audit revenues grew 9%, and its advisory sales increased 7%, “benefiting from significant investments in technology and market-leading alliances,” according to a press release at the time.
