KPMG and Uniphore Forge Alliance to Industrialize Business AI

PALO ALTO, CA – January 19, 2026 – In a significant move to bridge the gap between artificial intelligence experimentation and enterprise-wide adoption, consulting giant KPMG LLP has entered a strategic relationship with Business AI company Uniphore. The collaboration is set to operationalize sophisticated AI agents across KPMG's internal and client-facing workflows, with a sharp focus on the complex and highly regulated sectors of banking, insurance, energy, and healthcare.

This partnership aims to solve one of the most persistent challenges in corporate AI: moving promising technologies out of isolated labs and into the core of business operations. By leveraging Uniphore’s Business AI Cloud platform, the initiative will build and deploy AI agents powered by fine-tuned small language models (SLMs), marking a decisive shift from speculative pilots to production-grade, value-driven deployment.

From Pilot Paralysis to Production Power

For years, enterprises have been caught in a cycle of “pilot paralysis,” where innovative AI models demonstrate potential in controlled environments but fail to scale across complex, interconnected business systems. The partnership between KPMG and Uniphore is engineered to break this cycle by providing a governed, repeatable process for embedding AI directly into real-world workflows.

At the heart of this strategy is Uniphore’s Business AI Cloud, a platform built on a sovereign, composable, and secure architecture. This design directly addresses the primary concerns of enterprise IT leaders. Its sovereign nature gives organizations complete control over their data and AI models, whether deployed on-premises, in the cloud, or in a hybrid environment. The composable framework allows the platform to integrate seamlessly with a company’s existing technology stack, including modern data platforms like Databricks and Snowflake, eliminating the need for disruptive and costly data migrations. This “zero-copy” approach ensures data remains in its governed environment, preserving established controls around lineage, access, and policy enforcement.

“We are thrilled to align with Uniphore’s vision for AI as a transformative force for business as we focus on helping clients move from AI experimentation to real operational value," said Prasad Jayaraman, advisory principal at KPMG. This sentiment captures the core mission of the alliance: to deliver measurable outcomes rather than isolated model benchmarks.

Taming AI for the World's Toughest Industries

Deploying AI in regulated industries is fraught with challenges. The stringent requirements for data privacy, security, and regulatory compliance—such as GDPR in Europe or HIPAA in healthcare—create high barriers to entry. Furthermore, the “black box” nature of many AI models is a non-starter for sectors that demand full transparency and auditability in their decision-making processes.

The KPMG-Uniphore solution is tailored to navigate this demanding landscape. By working directly alongside enterprise-grade data foundations, the AI agents can reason over trusted production data. A central component of this approach is an innovative SLM factory model. Instead of relying on monolithic, general-purpose large language models, this model enables the creation of smaller, highly specialized language models.

These SLMs are fine-tuned by encoding an organization's unique institutional knowledge, proprietary process playbooks, and complex regulatory frameworks. The result is a fleet of AI agents with deep domain expertise, capable of delivering more accurate, context-aware, and compliant outcomes. This method not only improves performance on specific tasks but also enhances the explainability and governance essential for passing regulatory scrutiny.

The Evolving Consultant: From Advisor to AI Governor

This strategic alliance also signals a profound transformation in the nature of consulting itself. KPMG is advancing a model where its global workforce is not replaced by AI but is instead empowered by it. The firm is heavily investing in training its consultants to become designers, deployers, and governors of AI agents.

This new paradigm combines the irreplaceable value of human judgment and deep industry expertise with the speed and scale of AI execution. Consultants will increasingly focus on higher-value strategic tasks—defining problems, designing solutions, and overseeing AI systems—while AI agents handle the repetitive, data-intensive work. This shift moves the consulting industry away from traditional time-based billing and toward outcome-based models where value is measured by tangible business results.

“Business AI proves its value in production, where enterprise environments are complex, regulated, and deeply interconnected,” said Umesh Sachdev, CEO and co-founder of Uniphore. “Our work with KPMG enables a repeatable process for running AI inside real enterprise workflows, so organizations can scale how people and AI work together and drive outcomes.”

AI Agents in Action: Revolutionizing Procurement

To make these concepts tangible, one of the initial solutions KPMG is developing with Uniphore is an AI-powered procurement and contracting capability. This system deploys AI agents directly into the contracting workflow to address common pain points such as revenue leakage, extended review cycles, and inconsistent risk management.

These agents are designed to perform a range of sophisticated tasks automatically. They can classify high-value contracts, meticulously compare proposed terms against a company’s approved legal and commercial standards, extract critical obligations and deadlines, and intelligently flag non-compliant clauses or heightened risks. Any exceptions are automatically routed to the appropriate human experts for approval, ensuring that legal and finance teams focus their attention where it is most needed.

By operating directly within the enterprise’s existing systems, this solution demonstrates how AI can be embedded to drive efficiency and control in a core business process, moving far beyond the typical scope of customer-facing chatbots.

This initiative underscores a broader market trend toward practical, embedded AI that delivers real returns. As highlighted by the announcement's timing with the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, the conversation among global leaders has shifted from the theoretical promise of AI to the practicalities of its governed implementation.

“Uniphore is becoming an increasingly significant player in enterprise AI, and we are pleased to work together to help translate business knowledge into AI-enabled delivery models that drive real outcomes for our clients,” Jayaraman added. The partnership serves as a blueprint for how deep industry expertise and cutting-edge technology can merge to unlock the next wave of enterprise transformation.