When Big Tech comes for your margin, Wall Street doesn't compete—it joins forces, then brings the entire portfolio along for the ride.
The Summary
- Anthropic launched a consulting venture with Goldman Sachs, Blackstone, and Hellman & Friedman, targeting mid-sized firms that lack AI resources. OpenAI countered with its own consortium backed by TPG, Brookfield, Advent, and Bain.
- The move puts both AI giants in direct competition with McKinsey and traditional consulting firms, with an insider calling Anthropic's play the "McKinsey of AI."
- Wall Street gets instant AI deployment across portfolio companies. The AI firms get distribution at scale. Everyone skips the messy middle of sales cycles and implementation uncertainty.
The Signal
The consulting industry just got a distribution problem. Anthropic and OpenAI aren't just building AI models anymore—they're building services businesses with the most powerful sales force in capitalism: private equity firms with thousands of portfolio companies that need to show AI-driven efficiency gains before their next board meeting.
The target is specific: community banks, mid-sized manufacturers, companies that "stand to gain from AI, but lack the in-house resources to build and run frontier deployments," according to Anthropic's release. This isn't about Fortune 500 companies with AI labs. This is about the 10,000 regional insurers, supply chain operators, and commercial real estate firms that make up the portfolio holdings of Blackstone and Goldman's private equity arms.
"The company wants to work with everyone from community banks to mid-sized manufacturers who stand to gain from AI, but lack the in-house resources."
The playbook is elegant:
- PE firm identifies portco that needs AI transformation
- AI company embeds engineers for "frontier deployments"
- Portfolio company becomes case study and reference customer
- PE firm shows alpha on the investment thesis
- AI company scales without building a traditional sales team
Traditional consultants charge by the hour and leave you with a PowerPoint. Anthropic and OpenAI are offering something different: engineers from the world's top AI startups who will actually build and run the systems. The implied promise is speed. No six-month discovery phase. No change management theater. Just deployment.
Wall Street has done this dance before. When fintech threatened trading desks, the big banks didn't fight—they bought stakes in the startups and became their best customers. When crypto looked like it might route around traditional finance, Blackstone and Fidelity started offering custody services. The pattern is clear: if you can't kill the new thing, own a piece of it and control how it gets distributed to your captive customer base.
The Implication
McKinsey and Bain have six months to figure out their AI story before their biggest clients start taking calls from portfolio managers who already have engineers on speed dial. For mid-market companies, the calculus just shifted. Your PE owner isn't asking if you're exploring AI anymore. They're asking why you haven't started the pilot with the firm they just partnered with.
Watch for the second-order move: These consulting ventures will generate the best implementation data in the industry. Anthropic and OpenAI will see exactly which AI use cases actually work at scale across thousands of deployments. That data feeds back into model development. The consulting business isn't the product. It's the training ground.