Today, McKinsey & Company and OpenAI are bringing our collaboration to the next level through the OpenAI Frontier Alliance, a multi-year joint effort designed to help enterprise clients deploy AI coworkers across the enterprise. This alliance will prepare organizations to define AI strategy, integrate systems, redesign workflows, and scale deployment globally in order to achieve significant organizational change.
The alliance further expands McKinsey and OpenAI’s collaboration, creating a holistic approach to AI transformation and scaled delivery for clients building on Frontier, OpenAI’s new platform for building, deploying, and managing AI coworkers that can do real work across the enterprise. The alliance combines McKinsey’s experience with end-to-end transformation, industry insights/IP, and deep technical expertise from QuantumBlack, McKinsey’s AI arm, with OpenAI’s research and product expertise. QuantumBlack provides clients with a suite of horizontal and vertical assets, and hybrid teams with business experience and tech expertise in deploying agents and driving adoption. OpenAI Frontier is an AI intelligence layer for enterprises that integrates capabilities such as context, memory, agentic orchestration, custom models, and APIs to power high-value agentic AI use cases, ChatGPT Enterprise, and Codex.
Our QuantumBlack forward-deployed teams will create a tight feedback loop between enterprise deployments and OpenAI, accelerating research and product development for clients and strengthening the underlying capabilities over time.
“Clients are tackling the complexity of moving from siloed experimentation to real impact,” says Ben Ellencweig, a Senior Partner who leads alliances, acquisitions and partnerships globally for QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey. “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.”
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. The alliance aims to industrialize the path from prioritization to secure, governed production deployments in weeks, not months.
McKinsey’s research finds that 62 percent of organizations are experimenting with AI agents, but only 23 percent report scaling an agentic AI system somewhere in their enterprise. Organizations are looking for change management and value assurance to ensure that deployments are driving value to the bottom line. This helps them build the credibility to invest in scaling.
“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.”
“Empowering domains across the enterprise to become AI-ready rapidly helps every function to operate and innovate with AI,” says Virginia Simmons, Senior Partner and Global Leader of Alliances & Ecosystems at McKinsey & Company. “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.”
McKinsey believes that innovation thrives in collaboration. Frontier Alliance adds another distinctive offering to McKinsey’s open ecosystem of tech alliances and in-house AI capabilities and platforms. In addition to our collaboration with OpenAI, we work with an array of leading technology providers in McKinsey's ecosystem to bring clients the best innovation across all dimensions of AI.