Dive Brief:

• KPMG has expanded its investment in Salesforce’s “Agentforce” platform, equipping its sales professionals worldwide with access to the agentic artificial intelligence tool, the Big Four accounting firm said in a recent announcement.
• The firm announced the Salesforce deal last week on the heels of touting its firm-wide adoption of Gemini Enterprise, a Google Cloud agentic AI platform.
• “We’re using these investments to understand this market that’s moving very quickly and to be able to take actionable, real insights back to our clients,” Todd Lohr, head of ecosystems and national operations leader for advisory markets at KPMG, said in an interview.

Dive Insight:

KPMG and its competitors are locked in a technology investment race that is heating up amid rapid advancements in AI.

In August, Salesforce released survey findings showing that only 4% of CFOs had a conservative AI strategy, down from 70% in 2020.

“This rapid transformation highlights a widespread recognition among financial leaders that AI is no longer just an emerging technology but a crucial tool for enhancing efficiency, optimizing operations, and, critically, driving long-term growth,” according to a summary of the findings.

Respondents said they expected AI agents in particular to increase company revenue by almost 20%. On average, CFOs reported allocating 25% of their current total AI budgets for agents.

Despite its potential promise, AI has increasingly been at the center of controversy as well.

In 2023, a New York federal judge sanctioned two lawyers who submitted a legal brief that included fictitious case citations generated by ChatGPT.

More recently, news surfaced this month that KPMG competitor Deloitte’s Australian arm had to partially refund the Australian government for a document that was full of AI-generated errors.

“Every technology that changes how we live and work brings both promise and risk,” Fed Governor Christopher Waller said in a speech last week. “AI is no exception. Fraud, disinformation, bias, and cybersecurity threats are already emerging… The task for policymakers is to manage those risks without slowing the innovation that drives growth.”

For its part, KPMG views AI as a game changer that has implications for its entire business, Lohr said.

“I think a lot of organizations are looking at AI as an efficiency play,” he said. “It is that, but we’re looking at this much more as a business model disruption across the organization.”

KPMG’s Agentforce deployment will enable its teams to “automate research, streamline meeting preparation and summarize key insights to strengthen key discussions at every touch point in the client relationship,” the firm said in a press release last week.

“KPMG has rigorously vetted Agentforce against its Trusted AI Framework — just as it does with all AI deployments — empowering the firm and its clients to adopt the technology with confidence,” the release said.

KPMG is still in the “early days” of worldwide Agentforce adoption, according to Lohr. While the effort is currently focused on KPMG’s sales activities, this could expand over time, he said. 

“I know that Salesforce’s strategy is not just to be a CRM [customer relationship management] platform, but to really be an enterprise platform — to connect the front to the middle to the back office,” he said. 

On the Google Cloud side, KPMG is “working through a number of broad enterprise use cases across its functions,” Lohr said.

The firm is leveraging Gemini Enterprise to “pioneer AI agents for clients, with repeatable use cases in finance, procurement, and infrastructure,” according to an Oct. 9 release. Nearly 700 “no-code AI agents” have been created by employees since late September, the firm said.

Meanwhile, KPMG competitor PwC is boosting adoption of Oracle’s Fusion Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning platform, which has been equipped with new agentic AI capabilities, according to an Oct. 15 release from Oracle. PwC also announced this month that it was expanding an alliance with Google Cloud and launching an agentic AI-powered customer engagement tool created in collaboration with Salesforce. 

Deloitte highlighted agentic AI-related deals with Salesforce and Google in announcements earlier this year.