PwC to become OpenAI’s first reseller and largest enterprise user

PwC landed a deal Wednesday with OpenAI to become the artificial intelligence company’s first resale partner and largest enterprise user.

The Big Four accounting firm said its U.S. and U.K. firms had signed an agreement with the Microsoft-backed company to offer ChatGPT Enterprise, the business-focused version of its generative AI chatbot, to employees and clients.

The agreement will “expand our technology ecosystem, bring GenAI deeper into our enterprise, and enable us to scale AI capabilities across businesses to help drive accelerated impact for clients,” PwC said in a blogpost Wednesday.

PwC said the deal will see its U.S. and U.K. employees and clients gain access to the latest tools from OpenAI, including its recently announced ChatGPT-4o model and new capabilities focused on voice and image.

“By being on the forefront of OpenAI’s models and as the first company to announce integration into its practice, we are uniquely positioned to help clients leverage ChatGPT Enterprise for better and faster ways of working,” PwC said in its post.

PwC will hand ChatGPT Enterprise licenses to over 100,000 employees — 75,000 in the U.S. and 26,000 in the U.K. — according to Wall Street Journal, which earlier reported on the deal. PwC did not specify the number of workers that would use ChatGPT Enterprise.

“By embracing ChatGPT Enterprise across our workforce, we will bring our first-hand experience of our AI transformation to clients, complementing our audit, tax and consulting services with a broad array of business and industry solutions,” the company said.

PwC didn’t disclose the financial terms of the deal.

The company is reportedly losing hundreds of millions of dollars due to the huge computing costs associated with generative AI.

It has been increasingly turning to premium subscriptions and enterprise sales as a way to make money from AI.

In February 2023, OpenAI launched a paid version of ChatGPT, called ChatGPT Plus. Later that year, in August, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Enterprise, a higher-security version of its chatbot targeted at businesses.

The deal announced Wednesday also forms part of PwC’s broader push into AI.

In April last year, PwC announced it intends to commit $1 billion of investment over three years to expand and scale its capabilities in AI.

PwC says it has been developing custom GPTs to help its workforce review tax returns, generate proposal responses, and generate reports and dashboards.

PwC says it’s also been helping its clients accelerate implementation of generative AI, having identified over 3,000 internal use cases spanning different industries.