Global consultancy firm, McKinsey & Company, recently announced that it collaborated with Cohere, an generative AI startup, to offer AI solutions to its enterprise clients. This marks McKinsey’s first partnership with a large language model provider and comes as part of the growing interest in AI globally, ignited by Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

“We are seeing our clients consider cost, IP protection and consumer privacy, and how the model is trained. We found Cohere to be one of the great solutions out there,” said Ben Ellencweig, senior partner at McKinsey, in an interview with Reuters. 

With this, the duo will work on building custom solutions to enhance customer engagement and automate workflows for its customers. Additionally, McKinsey is exploring the possibility of leveraging Cohere to improve internal efficiency and bolster its knowledge management system.

The collaboration between McKinsey and Cohere has already begun, providing services to companies across various industries, such as financial services and retail, although specific names were not disclosed.

Cohere, founded by Nick Frosst, a former top AI researcher from Google’s Alphabet, positions itself as a neutral provider for enterprises, not tied to specific cloud providers like Microsoft. It competes with OpenAI by focusing on generative AI solutions for businesses.

Unleashing Secure Generative AI Solutions 

Recently, Cohere raised $270 million in funding from investors like Nvidia, Oracle, and Salesforce Ventures, reaching a valuation of $2.2 billion. Furthermore, it formed a partnership with Oracle, enabling the integration of its generative AI technology into Oracle’s products. Their cloud partners are AWS and Google Cloud. 

Martin Kon, President at Cohere, emphasised that partnering with strong and complementary entities like McKinsey was part of their strategy to have a significant impact on the world through enterprise-focused AI solutions.

Other consulting firms have also been making AI investments and forming partnerships in the AI space. For instance, Accenture announced a $3 billion investment in AI, PwC committed to investing $1 billion over the next three years, Bain and Company teamed up with OpenAI, and Deloitte partnered with chipmaker Nvidia.

The collaboration between McKinsey and Cohere signifies the growing interest and investment in AI within the consulting industry, aiming to leverage AI technologies for various business applications and improvements.