KPMG just gave Claude to 276,000 people
The Big Four stopped talking about AI and started deploying it. The people one tier below should be paying attention.
In May, KPMG and Anthropic announced a global alliance. Claude, the same model I use to run Orca, is now being deployed across KPMG’s entire 276,000-person workforce. Not a pilot. Not a sandbox. Not a carefully ring-fenced experiment with 200 people and a change management consultant. The whole firm.
This is the Big Four doing it, not talking about it.
The Next Rung is a book on how AI is quietly dismantling the middle of knowledge work, and what you can do about it before the market decides for you: pre-order it before it publishes in January.
The details matter less than the signal. When a professional services firm with 276,000 employees commits to deploying an AI assistant across the organisation, it tells you something about where we are on the adoption curve. We are past the point where enterprise AI is a conference-stage talking point. We are at the point where it is a line item in a global services contract.
Here’s the thing. The 276,000 people inside KPMG will be fine. They’ll get training. They’ll get internal support. They’ll get new workflows. The firm has every incentive to make this work because the productivity gains flow directly to the partnership. The people who should be worried are the ones who aren’t inside KPMG. The mid-level accountants at the next firm down. The auditors at a regional practice that can’t afford an Anthropic alliance. The analysts whose work product is now being generated by the same AI that a quarter of a million of their competitors just got handed.
In the book, Chapter 6 covers what I call critical mass. The point where AI goes from something bolted on to the existing structure to something the structure gets redesigned around. The analogy I use is the gym: adopting AI is buying the membership, redesigning around AI is actually going. KPMG just started going to the gym. Every firm that competes with them now has to decide whether to follow or to pretend the membership card in the drawer is enough.
The competitive dynamics are brutal. A firm running Claude across 276,000 people can reprice engagements. The audit that took a team of six and three weeks can now be scoped for a team of three and ten days. Not because the AI replaces the auditors. Because it replaces the orchestration work that padded the engagement: the data gathering, the cross-referencing, the first-pass analysis, the formatting, the status reporting. The senior judgement stays. The billable hours around it compress.
Which means the firms that don’t follow are competing on a cost structure that no longer reflects the market. That’s not a slow squeeze. That’s a repricing event.
The Next Rung is a book on how AI is quietly dismantling the middle of knowledge work, and what you can do about it before the market decides for you: pre-order it before it publishes in January.
I built Orca on the same Claude API that KPMG just rolled out. Same underlying model. Same capabilities. The difference is what it’s pointed at. KPMG is deploying Claude to replace tasks. I built Orca to replace roles. The executive assistant, the meeting prepper, the email drafter, the calendar manager, the contact intelligence layer. Not a tool that helps someone do their job. A system that does the job.
That distinction matters because it tells you what’s coming next. Task replacement is where the enterprise starts. Role replacement is where it ends up. KPMG’s 276,000 people will spend the next twelve months discovering that Claude doesn’t just help them do their work faster. It makes certain categories of work unnecessary. The task layer compresses first. Then the role layer follows.
The quiet squeeze that Chapter 4 of the book describes, where displacement happens without anyone using the word “redundancy”, is about to play out inside the world’s largest professional services firms simultaneously. Nobody will get fired because of this announcement. Hiring plans will get revised. Contractor renewals will lapse. Graduate intake numbers will quietly drop. The headcount reduction happens through absence, not action.
For the 276,000, the question is whether they’re the ones using Claude or the ones whose output Claude is replacing. For everyone outside the Big Four, the question is simpler: your competitors just got faster, cheaper, and more consistent. What’s your move?
The adoption curve just kinked upward. The firms that treat this as someone else’s problem will find out it’s theirs about eighteen months from now, when the repriced engagements start winning the work they used to get.