PwC signed an agreement with OpenAI on Wednesday to become the largest business customer and the company’s first reselling partner in the artificial intelligence space.

The Microsoft-backed company, ChatGPT Enterprise, is a business-focused version of its generative AI chatbot that the Big Four accounting firm says its U.S. and U.K. companies had inked a deal to make available to staff and clients.

According to a blog post published by PwC on Wednesday, the collaboration would “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.”

According to PwC, the agreement will give its clients and staff in the United States and the United Kingdom access to the newest OpenAI tools, including as the recently unveiled ChatGPT-4o model and other speech and image-focused features.

“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.

Over 100,000 employees—75,000 in the United States and 26,000 in the United Kingdom—will receive ChatGPT Enterprise licences from PwC, according to a Wall Street Journal story that first broke the news of the agreement. The number of employees who will utilise ChatGPT Enterprise was not disclosed by PwC.

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

The financial details of the agreement were not revealed by PwC.

For the first time, OpenAI has decided to offer its well-liked AI products through a resale mechanism.

The enormous computational requirements of generative AI are apparently costing the corporation hundreds of millions of dollars.

It has been relying more and more on business sales and premium subscriptions to monetize AI.

OpenAI released ChatGPT Plus, a premium version of the software, in February 2023. August of the same year saw the release of ChatGPT Enterprise by OpenAI, a more secure chatbot geared towards enterprises.

The agreement, which was revealed on Wednesday, is a component of PwC’s larger AI initiative.

PwC declared in April of last year that it plans to invest $1 billion over the course of three years to develop and scale its artificial intelligence capabilities.

According to PwC, it has been creating customised GPTs to assist its employees with reviewing tax returns, producing proposal answers, and creating dashboards and reports.

PwC claims to have found over 3,000 internal use cases across several sectors, and that it has been assisting its clients in expediting the adoption of generative AI.

(Adapted from Business-Standard.com)