McKinsey & Co and OpenAI Partner Up with New Frontier Alliance
“Working side by side with OpenAI enhances our ability to help companies reimagine their business to capture more value from AI"
McKinsey and OpenAI are focusing on enterprise AI deployment through the OpenAI Frontier Alliance, a multi-year partnership announced this week that positions AI coworkers as the next phase of organizational transformation.
The alliance, which includes Boston Consulting Group, Accenture, and Capgemini, will help enterprise clients navigate AI strategy, systems integration, workflow redesign, and global-scale deployment.
The collaboration centers on Frontier, OpenAI's new enterprise platform for building and managing AI coworkers capable of performing actual work across organizations.
Frontier functions as an AI intelligence layer that integrates context, memory, agentic orchestration, custom models, and APIs to power high-value use cases alongside ChatGPT Enterprise. Early adopters include Intuit, State Farm, Thermo Fisher, and Uber.
Combining Transformation Expertise with Research Leadership
Ben Ellencweig, a Senior Partner who leads alliances, acquisitions, and partnerships globally for QuantumBlack, described the operational challenge clients face. “Clients are tackling the complexity of moving from siloed experimentation to real impact,” he said. “Working side by side with OpenAI enhances our ability to help companies reimagine their business to capture more value from AI, from strategy to talent, operating models, data, technology architecture, and change management.”
The collaboration leverages McKinsey's transformation capabilities and industry expertise alongside OpenAI's AI research and platform development. Through QuantumBlack, McKinsey's AI division, clients gain access to specialized teams that combine business acumen with technical skills in agent deployment and organizational adoption.
QuantumBlack's on-site teams will establish direct feedback channels between client implementations and OpenAI's product development, enabling continuous improvement of both enterprise solutions and the underlying platform capabilities.
According to McKinsey research, while nearly two-thirds of organizations are piloting AI agents, fewer than one in four have successfully scaled these systems across their enterprise. Companies need robust change management frameworks and clear value tracking to ensure AI investments deliver measurable business impact.
This helps them build the credibility to invest in scaling. The alliance aims to industrialize the path from prioritization to secure, governed production deployments in weeks.
McKinsey and OpenAI will work together with clients to identify high-value use cases, build and deploy production-grade agentic AI solutions, and redesign workflows to support adoption and sustained impact across sectors.
“Our multi-year partnership with McKinsey will help bring AI coworkers to enterprises,” said Brad Lightcap, Chief Operating Officer at OpenAI. “McKinsey’s transformation and global delivery expertise alongside OpenAI’s research and product leadership will help close the gap between what frontier AI can do and what businesses can actually deploy with agents.”
Rewiring Enterprises for Agentic AI Scale
Virginia Simmons, Senior Partner and Global Leader of Alliances & Ecosystems at McKinsey & Company, talked about the operational scope required to ensure enterprise value is realized, measured, and sustained.
“Empowering domains across the enterprise to become AI-ready rapidly helps every function to operate and innovate with AI,” she said. “To ensure enterprise value is realized, measured, and sustained, we need to rewire processes, operating models, and capability-building end-to-end. We are excited to embark on the next step in our journey with OpenAI.”
Bob Sternfels, McKinsey’s global managing partner, reinforced that agentic AI requires fundamental business transformation, not incremental technology adoption. CEOs must “rewire their businesses, reimagining domains and evolving how their people work” to capture value from agentic AI. The framing is that AI transformation is organizational change that touches strategy, talent, operations, data architecture, and change management, not simply a technology deployment.
McKinsey has emphasized that innovation thrives in collaboration, and the Frontier Alliance adds another distinctive offering to McKinsey’s open ecosystem of tech alliances and in-house AI capabilities and platforms.
In addition to the collaboration with OpenAI, McKinsey works with an array of leading technology providers in its ecosystem to bring clients the best innovation across all dimensions of AI.
The partnerships are part of OpenAI’s effort to compete directly with Anthropic in the enterprise market, where Anthropic has made substantial progress with its Claude Code and Claude Cowork products.