We wrapped up a multimonth evaluation of 10 AI consulting service providers: Accenture, Bain & Company, Boston Consulting Group, Capgemini, Deloitte, EY, IBM, KPMG, McKinsey & Company, and PwC. It’s available to Forrester clients as The Forrester Wave™: AI Consulting Services, Q2 2026.

There are more than 10 AI consulting service providers, of course — we analyzed a larger list of 37 providers that we profile for Forrester clients in our report, The AI Consulting Services Landscape, Q3 2025. In addition, The Forrester Wave™: AI Technical Services, Q4 2025 and The AI Technical Services Landscape, Q2 2025 highlight service providers that specialize in AI technical implementations.

In the Wave evaluation, we probed on the abilities of the 10 providers to help enterprise clients get value from artificial intelligence, including operational efficiency from AI agents, innovation from empowering employees, improved customer experience through AI-powered contact centers and self-service chatbots, and product-led growth from AI-powered offerings. The short story is that all 10 providers are great partners for the right situation. Start with their similarities:

  • All 10 providers have AI transformation capabilities to help you with business strategy, value management, AI operations, data and model engineering, agent development, change management, and security.
  • All 10 providers have strong technology partnerships with an all-inclusive list of alliances spanning model builders, hyperscalers, data infrastructure suppliers, software companies, and security platforms.
  • All 10 providers use AI-powered delivery platforms to accelerate delivery, lower costs, and improve the quality of the work output.
  • All 10 providers are willing to put fees at risk with results-based pricing models — a handful of them do this most of the time.

Which Provider Is Best For You?

Yes, we evaluated the crème de la crème with many similarities. But some providers are better at AI for operational efficiency while others are better at empowering employees with AI tools. Some providers lead in financial services; others are better in healthcare. Some are better with customer-facing initiatives, others for back-office processes.

You must go beyond the Forrester Wave graphic to find the best provider for you — the devil is in the details of how each provider rates relative to other providers, both in current product offering and long-term strategy. We leave you with six lessons for AI transformation success:

  1. Start with a business opportunity and assemble the business, operations, and risk sponsors that will join technology leaders in defining and executing on the opportunity in the form of initiatives.
  2. Invest in data, AI platforms, and operating model foundations before scaling AI use cases. You’ll quickly learn where the gaps are.
  3. Model the costs of inferencing and AI operations up front, with gates for further investment before scaling use.
  4. Put design thinking, user journeys, and behavior change at the center of the program. If employees and customers don’t use the AI tools, then it has no value whatsoever. Dig out and update your mobile transformation playbook.
  5. Ensure that your service provider brings blended teams of business, operations, data science, and engineering skills. Even hyperscalers are recognizing the need for forward-deployed engineers and investing heavily in them. But you can’t do AI transformations with forward-deployed engineers alone; you need a provider team that mirrors your own AI operations team.
  6. Ask the provider to put some portion of their fees at risk with results-based pricing. Use hybrid models and fixed fees to accelerate dealmaking.

Let Us Know How We Can Help

This analysis is the tip of the iceberg of what we learned in this evaluation. We have details on 10 providers in the Wave and more than 20 others from our landscape evaluations. Forrester customers can schedule a guidance session to review goals, analyze strategy, and help create a shortlist of AI consulting service providers that can help.

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