An honest comparison
Advice and delivery are not the same purchase.
Big 4 firms do serious AI and data work, and for a whole class of problem they are the right call. The narrower question is what you want to exist on the day the engagement closes.
Strategy, risk and technology advisory, usually entered through an existing audit, tax or assurance relationship. Deep governance, controls and change-management capability, with implementation typically delivered on top of a platform vendor's product and staffed from a consulting pyramid.
One senior pod owns the path from first model to monitored production system. Scoped to a single business metric, priced against that outcome and its milestones rather than open-ended hours. The system, its evaluation harness and its documentation are handed over for your own team to run.
The useful question is not which firm is more capable. It is what exists on the last day. A recommendation your team then has to build, or a system already running against the number it was scoped to move.
8 weeks
Typical engagement, first scoping call to handover.
One senior pod, scoped to a single metric and priced against it, ending in a running system with its evaluation harness and the documentation your team needs to own it.
There is no figure opposite ours. Programme lengths vary far too much to state as fact, and inventing one would fail the same test that kept every other statistic off this page.
If your AI work has to survive audit, regulatory scrutiny or a board risk committee, this is genuinely their home ground and not ours.
Getting thousands of people to work differently is a real discipline. A Big 4 firm has it; an engineering pod does not.
A Big 4 name on the recommendation carries weight in rooms where an unfamiliar supplier does not. That is worth something real.
What you give up
Worth pinning down early whether the engagement ends in a recommendation or in working software, and who builds it if not them.
Leverage is the model: a partner wins the work, and the week-to-week is staffed below them. Worth getting the named people and their actual allocation in writing before signing, rather than discovering it at kickoff.
Much of what gets built is configuration of a platform vendor's software. That may be right for you, but it is a different purchase from custom systems.
The engineers who scope the problem are the ones who build and operate the system. There is no second contract with an implementation partner, and no point where the thinking is handed to people who were not in the room for it.
The code, the evaluation harness and the documentation are yours at handover. Not a licensed platform tuned to your process, and not something that needs the original vendor back in the room to change.
Each engagement is scoped to a single business metric it exists to move, with milestones tied to that metric rather than to phases on a calendar.
What you give up
We build evaluation and monitoring into the systems we ship, but we are not a substitute for audit, regulatory advisory or a risk function.
If the hard part of your problem is getting a large organisation to adopt something, that is a different capability from the one we sell.
We do not carry the institutional weight a Big 4 logo does. In some rooms that matters, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
A national retailer already knew its forecasting was costing it twice, in stockouts on the fast movers and working capital buried in the slow ones. What it did not have was a forecast wired into replenishment, backtested before it shipped and monitored once it was live. That is the whole distance between a finding and a system.
31%Fewer stockouts
Read the case studyA direct conversation about the problem, the metric, and whether we are the right shape for it. If another option on this page fits you better, we will say so.
