KPMG demonstrates there are many paths to building your innovation ecosystem

HFS analysts recently had the opportunity to engage with KPMG leaders and many of the company’s North American clients at its recent Tech & Innovation Symposium. The event made two things clear: First, the generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) hype is most certainly real, and, second, enterprises will need to reach far and wide to build their innovation ecosystems to find success, as KPMG does for itself and its clients today.

Alliances bring cutting-edge technology innovation within reach of enterprise leaders

KPMG is partnering with a multitude of tech and services companies to explore Horizon 1, 2, and 3 opportunities—and we don’t mean press release partnerships. The goal is to help enterprise clients gain tangible business value from emerging technologies in KPMG’s consulting and managed services business. Another goal is to help the company evolve its traditional businesses in tax, finance, and advisory—a bigger ask for risk-averse practices.

How is the service provider executing this? We saw five fantastic examples in action at the Symposium.

KPMG is doubling down on GenAI

KPMG, like many of its peers, is betting big on GenAI. It has alliances with large tech players like Google and Microsoft and startups such as Anthropic to bring this bet to life. In the next few months, KPMG will launch five distinct large language models (LLMs) for clients in certain industry specializations and horizontals. KPMG’s consulting leaders advise clients to evaluate LLMs of different “t-shirt sizes,” depending on the use case, ultimately architecting full-stack solutions vs. siloed experiments.

The company is already using LLMs internally, with stacked models offering insights on what knowledge KPMG employees seek the most. The added insight helps the team learn more about what content to invest in to further build a robust GenAI knowledge discovery solution—a must for a professional services firm dependent on knowledge.

Non-traditional collaborator Epic Games is gamifying EX and CX

That’s right—Fortnite creator Epic Games and KPMG are collaborating to bring gamification concepts to certain industries to improve employee experience (EX) and customer experience (CX). Epic Games’ Partnerships Leader mentioned that the company enjoys collaborating with KPMG, bringing industry knowledge that makes it easy to relate tech concepts to C-level executives and find novel use cases like automotive driving experiences.

Horizon 3 partnerships explore metaverse, Web3, quantum, and more

GenAI is here and now, but KPMG’s tech leaders are eyeing the next technology horizons and amping up their go-to-market and IP development efforts with partners. As an “out there” example, the service provider is now part of the IBM Quantum Network. As quantum computing hardware matures, KPMG is helping IBM and its clients find use cases linked to industry-specific business needs and developing the necessary middleware, algorithms, and applications to form the enterprise quantum tech stack.

KPMG Studio is creating entirely new businesses

KPMG Studio incubates and spins out product companies to fill market gaps it discovers during its advisory work. A great example is Cranium, a software platform that helps clients understand in 15 to 20 minutes the security of artificial intelligence (AI) pipelines and assets and ultimately secure them to build more trusted systems.

Ecosystem plays bridge the tech talent gap

Finding skilled talent to bring you new ideas is half the innovation battle won. As a part of its hiring process, KPMG works with partners that are thinking outside the box on tech talent development in North America. Break Through Tech, for example, brings more women from underserved communities to the enterprise radar, and KPMG offers “sprinternships” to promising candidates.

The Bottom Line: Diversity of thought is critical to the innovation process. Find yourself a partner that can bring new ideas—from inside and outside its walls.

The road to innovation is also paved with failure. KPMG will need to continue ramping up its R&D and knowledge base to help its clients judiciously navigate new technology initiatives, especially when macro forces are shrinking enterprise IT budgets all around. Not every GenAI and Web3 project will be a game changer, but the right one could entirely change your business. The key is picking innovation partners that can help you place the best bets.