Tools & Platforms
Grant Thornton Advisors to Sink $1 Billion Over Three Years on AI
Top 10 accounting firm Grant Thornton announced on Sept. 4 that Grant Thornton Advisors is investing $1 billion over three years to provide artificial intelligence tools and technology to the entire workforce at its multinational professional services platform, which stretches from the Americas across Europe to the Middle East.
The firm said the investment will help the platform deliver innovative and high-quality accounting, tax, and advisory services based on a people-centric model powered by AI. As a result, the multinational platform will be able to deliver a better end-to-end digital experience for both its professionals and its clients.
Grant Thornton Advisors established its multinational, mutidisciplinary platform in January 2025, with backing from private equity firm New Mountain Capital, which acquired a significant stake in Grant Thornton US in June 2024.
As a result, Grant Thornton now operates in an alternative practice structure: Grant Thornton LLP, a licensed CPA firm, provides attest services, and Grant Thornton Advisors LLC provides business advisory and non-attest services.
To date, Grant Thornton US sister firms from Ireland, the United Arab Emirates, Switzerland/Liechtenstein, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, the Cayman Islands, and the Channel Islands have joined the multinational platform.
As part of its AI investment, Grant Thornton Advisors is providing the more than 13,500 platform professionals in 60 multinational offices with access to Microsoft 365 Copilot. The rollout complements an earlier pilot project that saw Grant Thornton Advisors provide Microsoft’s AI tool to a 400-person cohort of professionals, generating significant productivity gains, the firm said.
“This isn’t just about investing in AI and technology, it’s about investing in our people,” Grant Thornton Advisors CEO Jim Peko said in a statement. “We’re giving every professional across our multinational platform—from Chicago to Dubai—the kinds of tools they need to work smarter, faster, and in keeping with their individual styles. The result is something that is uniquely Grant Thornton: People who are empowered do their best work so clients benefit from the quality and results they need.”
Mike Kempe, chief information officer for Grant Thornton Advisors, added, “This investment is a big step as we ensure that every person at the Grant Thornton Advisors platform has AI and technology resources at the ready—from our newest hires to our most seasoned professionals. The Microsoft 365 Copilot rollout, for example, will help our people save time, balance their workloads, and make more insightful decisions. This means they’ll be able to efficiently provide our clients with personalized high-quality services.”
Tom Puthiyamadam, Grant Thornton Advisors’ managing partner for advisory services in the U.S., stresses that the Copilot rollout is one of many moves that will help the firm deliver quality services powered by AI and grounded in human insights.
“We’re building a full-service platform amplified by AI and advanced technologies,” he said. “Investing in tools such as Copilot is a critical next step in this effort and part of a steady cadence of innovations that will help us provide clients with novel solutions to whatever challenges lie ahead.”
Over the past year, Grant Thornton Advisors has made progress implementing a phased AI maturity model across its platform. In May, it launched CompliAI, a proprietary AI solution that uses advanced capabilities and a custom-trained large-language model, to help clients control and assess risks.
In addition, Grant Thornton Advisors recently acquired Auxis, a U.S.-based leader in outsourcing and business modernization services. And last month, it added Stax, a strategy consulting firm specializing in commercial due-diligence, value-creation, and exit-planning services for private equity firms, as well as their portfolio companies and advisors.
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Artificial Intelligence
getty
If AI is going to matter at all in our economy, it has to matter for small businesses first.
As a search fund entrepreneur, I’ve met and worked with more than 300 CEOs and founders in cities across the U.S. from New York to Las Vegas, Sunnyvale to Maryland. In every conversation, the same concern surfaces: the AI models in our smartphones are more advanced than the technology stacks running our businesses. While the devices in our pockets update monthly, most business systems remain unchanged for years. And nowhere is this more evident than in small businesses.
This matters because small businesses employ more than 61 million people, nearly half the private workforce. Yet just a fraction of 1% are building the kinds of technology ventures that attract institutional capital.
So this means that the overwhelming majority of small businesses are self-funded and family-run. They’re bootstrapped by owners who pour their own savings into businesses that anchor the communities they care about. These are the businesses still running payroll on technology built a decade ago.
Family Businesses Meet AI Startups
Trusted relationships build businesses.
getty
The other day, I joined a lunch meeting with 80 small business owners who lead multi-generational family firms. This gathering was a masterclass in human networks. However, not once was technology mentioned in the entire meeting.
Every three weeks, all 80 members gather at a private club on Park Avenue for a three-course meal. The purpose was to share business priorities and make referrals and introductions for each member. There were green pens and notepads on the tables embossed with the motto: “Trusted relationships build businesses.” Over lunch, if each of the 80 members received just five new customer introductions, that’s over 400 new channels opened before dessert.
Four hours later, I was downtown at the city’s newest restaurant for a startup forum. Here, every conversation was about AI and technology, from AI-powered roll-ups and cybersecurity to founders turning New York’s vacant warehouses into sushi pop-ups.
Startup Forum in NYC Restaurant
New York, NY
Two Worlds In One City
Across every city I’ve traveled to, these two business communities live side by side but rarely meet. One is led by families built through trusted introductions and intellectual property developed over decades. The other is driven by startups fueled by the race to deploy the newest technology at scale.
What happens when these two worlds connect? Imagine today’s most advanced technology powering small family-owned businesses.
For the past 40 years, one model of entrepreneurship has created more than $10 billion in value by doing exactly this: investing in established small businesses and building them with new technology and leadership. The Search fund model, first launched at Stanford in 1984, was designed to bring innovation into established firms. One of the earliest search funds invested in a 50-person roadside assistance company and built it into Asurion, now a global tech-care enterprise with 23,000 employees and 300 million customers. Another transformed a compliance services firm into RIA-in-a-Box, a leading SaaS platform used by over 2,600 firms nationwide.
What once took years and significant capital investment can now be done in months. Today, enterprise-grade tools once reserved for Fortune 500 corporations are within reach of nearly every business. The playbooks that small businesses have relied on for decades to build multi-generational, value-based businesses can, when paired with AI, scale impact in weeks instead of years.
Across core functions, generative AI is cutting work times by more than 60%. If you can sketch an idea on a napkin, it can be built in hours, not weeks. Supply chains, compliance, document processing and technical workflows are already showing double-digit productivity improvements. In some cases, technical tasks have been reduced by as much as 70%.
Search funds are one proven path to bringing technology into legacy businesses. Others are emerging as well, including AI consulting firms, AI studios and AI-powered roll-up strategies, each with their own strategies to rebuild established firms with the most advanced technology available today.
The tools are here, the cost has never been lower, and the door is wide open—for now.
If AI is going to matter at all, it has to matter for small businesses first. Once it’s put to work, it will power growth across Main Street and fuel an economy that directly supports half the workforce.
Deep Tech creates technologies that form the backbone of national defense and industrial sovereignty
Generative AI may be the fastest-adopted technology in history, but in healthcare it is still largely seen through the narrow lens of chatbots. That perception, argued experts at WHX Tech-EHS Summit in Dubai during a panel discussion, risks blinding policymakers and providers to its deeper potential, and to the barriers that stand in its way.
“It’s like saying the internet is only e-mail,” said Christian Hein, former Novartis vice-president for digital transformation. “Chatbots are just the front-end. The real power lies in what sits beneath, which is an information engine capable of synthesising scientific literature, drafting clinical trial protocols, automating reimbursement coding and extracting unstructured data from medical records.”
The discussion, moderated by health AI consultant Sigrid Berge van Rooijen, opened with a question: Is generative AI destined to remain a glorified customer-service tool?
For Tatyana Kanzaveli, founder of Open Health Network, the danger lies in merely bolting new technologies onto outdated systems. “We cannot just deploy GenAI to augment old business processes,” she said. “Imagine agentive AI predicting when MRI equipment is about to fail, ordering the part, scheduling the engineer and coordinating the fix automatically. Or a digital twin monitoring your health data, arranging prescriptions, transport and care without you lifting a finger. That is the world we should be building.”
Bharat Gera, who has spent 25 years working on digital health transformation, echoed the need for caution but also saw promise in simple tools such as summarisation. “Doctors spend huge amounts of time reading patient histories. Summarisation is a powerful use case, here and now,” he said. But he warned against overloading clinicians with alarms and unvalidated signals: “Healthcare is fundamentally human. If we forget that, technology will make things worse.”
Regulation, risk and responsibility
If technology is racing ahead, regulation is struggling to keep pace. Amil Khanzada, CEO of Virufy, highlighted how laws differ dramatically across jurisdictions. “In Dubai, anonymised medical data cannot be sent overseas. In Pakistan, there isn’t even a privacy law yet. Patients have the right to delete their data, but what happens once that data has already trained a model? Do you retrain it from scratch?”
Consent forms, he added, are another minefield. “You can try to use generative AI to summarise them, but you still need human validation. And patients often sign without reading. The legal and ethical risks are enormous.”
Kanzaveli pointed to the dangers of misplaced trust. “Generative AI is persuasive. You trust it. But in healthcare, a wrong answer can mean a missed diagnosis, or worse. We spent longer building the risk-management framework for a virtual psychologist than we did building the engine itself. That is our responsibility.”
The human factor
Perhaps the most sobering intervention came from Anne Forsyth, Vice-Chair of Digital Health Canada and IT lead at Toronto’s Women’s College Hospital. She recounted how a cancer diagnosis was delayed for a year because test results were stuck in a hospital IT interface. “What do you tell the patient? Tech will never be perfect. We must always plan for failure,” she said. “If you are building GenAI tools for hospitals, think about what happens when they fail, and what supports clinicians will have.”
Hein agreed. “Technology is easy. Change is the hard part. The real work is persuading people that you are there to augment, not replace them. Without that, AI will never scale.”
A future too important to ignore
Despite their differing emphases, the panellists agreed that generative AI is already reshaping healthcare and that ignoring it is not an option. “There is no industry that can remain competitive without deploying these technologies,” Kanzaveli said. “The only question is how responsibly we do it.”
As Berge van Rooijen concluded, the challenge is not whether generative AI is more than a chatbot. It clearly is. The question is how to harness its promise without repeating the mistakes of past digital health revolutions, and without losing sight of the people at the heart of the system.
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