Bain & Company’s logo (Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images)

Consultants keep winning the AI wars

Bain is the latest consulting firm to cash in on the AI boom.

10/18/24 2:30PM

In late June, we discussed how consulting firms had quietly become the big winners of the AI boom.

Accenture generated $900 million, or an annualized $3.6 billion, in GenAI bookings in Q3, compared to OpenAI’s annualized revenue of $3.4 billion at the time. Additionally, Boston Consulting Group, which had $12.3 billion in 2023 revenue, projected that 20% of its 2024 revenue and 40% of its 2026 revenue would come from AI integration projects, and IBM’s consulting arm had booked a cumulative $1 billion from its AI products.

Four months later, the management consulting x artificial intelligence business pipeline remains quite robust, with The Wall Street Journal reporting that OpenAI and Bain have expanded their partnership, allowing Bain to sell industry-specific solutions built on OpenAI to clients:

“At the core of the deal is a team that will build industry-specific artificial-intelligence tools for sectors including retail and life sciences,” said Christophe De Vusser, worldwide managing partner and chief executive of the consulting firm. Bain is putting about 50 employees into the joint effort. OpenAI Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap declined to say how many OpenAI team members will be involved.

When I first wrote about Accenture's $3.6 billion generative-AI business, I found it amusing that the only company (besides OpenAI, of course), that had managed to make money on artificial intelligence was a consulting firm. However, looking at it now, these AI x consulting partnerships actually make a lot of sense.

Consulting firms, at the end of the day, are paid to help clients improve their businesses. OpenAI’s models are incredible tools that can help users more effectively organize, understand, and draw conclusions from data, but these models, by default, aren’t fine-tuned to work with specific users’ data.

Yes, an individual can log on ChatGPT and use it as a research tool, but in its basic format, companies can’t just seamlessly integrate ChatGPT with their private data to improve their businesses. While some companies, like fintech unicorn Ramp, have leveraged OpenAI’s models to enhance their own products, other companies either don’t have or don’t want to use internal resources to build their own OpenAI-based tools.

Enter: consulting firms, who are, as we said, paid to help clients improve their businesses. Bain knows OpenAI can be used to improve clients’ businesses, OpenAI knows that enterprise clients are highly lucrative, and many enterprise clients would rather pay Bain to build their OpenAI solutions than develop them internally. It’s really a win-win-win relationship for all three parties.

Shout-out to the consultants. Heads, they win; tails, they still don’t lose.

Max Knoblauch21h

The Trump administration is reportedly planning a 50% made-in-America requirement for USMCA tariff relief

Qualifying for USMCA-related lower tariffs may soon require more US-made vehicle components, according to reporting by The Wall Street Journal.

The Trump administration is reportedly planning to introduce a 50% US content requirement for vehicles covered by the trade pact to receive lower tariffs. The content would be measured by cost, according to the WSJ.

There currently isn’t any US-specific requirement for those lower tariff rates, but in order to receive preferential tariffs, vehicles are must contain at least 75% regional content (components made in North America). Per Reuters reporting, the Trump admin is seeking to raise the regional requirement to 82%.

These reported plans are subject to change as the US negotiates USMCA terms with Mexico over the next few months.

Overall, Tesla will likely have the easiest time qualifying for any stricter requirements. The automaker’s vehicles contained the highest amount of US/Canadian content in 2025, according to American University research. Ford, GM, and Stellantis all scored lower.

Notably: the underlying government data that many domestic content measurements rely on intentionally combines US and Canadian components, so it’s difficult to know exactly how much of any given vehicle is specifically US-made.

Exclusive | Trump Administration Wants Autos Under USMCA to Be at Least 50% Made in America

These reported plans are subject to change as the US negotiates USMCA terms with Mexico over the next few months.

Tom Jones5/29/26

The $640,000 Luce makes the average Ferrari look like a bargain

Put aside the shape; put aside the smoothing out of Ferrari’s iconic sharp edges; put aside, even, the calls from former Chairman and President Luca Cordero di Montezemolo to “take the Prancing Horse off.” On the grounds of price alone, Luce detractors might have a point.

By now, many of us will have read the criticisms of Ferrari’s first fully electric vehicle, as the Luce — which was unveiled to the world earlier this week and promptly saw the company’s shares crash out in New York and Milan — gets subtly shaded by competitors online and not-so-subtly shaded by basically everyone else.

What makes all of this worse for Ferrari is that, even by the luxury car maker’s notoriously high standards, they’ve slapped a pretty hefty price tag on the Luce, and the company’s CEO, Benedetto Vigna, has already been forced to defend the €550,000 ($640,000) price point, saying yesterday that it’s “fair to pay for innovation,” per Reuters.

While Ferrari’s cars have been getting more expensive of late, as recently as 2022, Ferrari’s average revenue per car sold was around $340,000. At nearly twice that price, this new electric model is obviously proving a little much (visually, conceptually, and financially) for many loyal and long-standing fans of the Prancing Horse to stomach.