KPMG Deploys Microsoft AI Agents Across Audit, Tax, and Advisory Services

KPMG Clara, the firm's audit platform, now uses AI agents to detect risk faster and surface sharper insights, while a tax-focused Digital Gateway provides real-time regulatory analysis to help organizations navigate evolving compliance requirements. These are not pilots. They are live deployments at a firm where global headcount grew to 276,030 through fiscal year 2025.

Working with Microsoft, KPMG integrated Microsoft 365 Copilot directly into the tools its professionals already use daily, including Teams, Outlook, Word, and Excel, turning productivity platforms into intelligent workspaces. Todd Lohr, KPMG's Principal and Head of Ecosystems, described the effect directly: "Microsoft 365 Copilot isn't just accelerating work, it's changing how we think and enabling our 280,000 professionals to scale their expertise like never before."

The rollout did not stop at access. KPMG chose Copilot Studio to empower business users and low-code developers to build agents rapidly, while Azure AI Foundry was chosen for its wide range of models, enabling the development of more complex solutions. Steve Chase, whose team oversees internal deployment, put the scale of the build-out plainly: "We've deployed tens of thousands of personas — micro-use cases created by our people. They allow us to experiment at scale, then industrialize what works." One internal agent helps new hires find templates and historical context, reducing follow-up calls by 20% and increasing time-to-productivity.

For auditors and advisory professionals, the practical upshot is that KPMG's agent strategy now spans departmental, functional, and enterprise-wide applications. KPMG's transformation began with KPMG Clara, its cloud-based smart audit platform used on every KPMG audit worldwide. KPMG Clara AI is tightly aligned with the Microsoft Agent Framework, built on the convergence of Semantic Kernel and AutoGen, meaning KPMG Clara AI can connect specialized agents to enterprise data and tools while benefiting from built-in safeguards and an open, extensible developer ecosystem. Sebastian Stöckle, Global Head of Audit Innovation and AI at KPMG International, captured the governance dimension: "Foundry Agent Service and Microsoft Agent Framework connect our agents to data and each other, and the governance and observability in Azure AI Foundry provide what KPMG firms need to be successful in a regulated industry."

Governance is not an afterthought in this architecture. The Microsoft AI stack, including Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Studio, and Azure AI Foundry, enabled KPMG to move fast, experiment broadly, and scale responsibly without compromising governance or trust. On the security side, KPMG's cybersecurity team deployed Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Microsoft Purview to monitor Azure OpenAI Service apps and govern content being migrated into Microsoft 365 and Copilot products. Greg Schellenberg, KPMG's Director of Cyber Security, described the objective in plain terms: "Purview and Defender help us prevent incidents before they occur. That's the name of the game in security: resolving problems before they affect our business."

The commercial relationship underpinning all of this is substantial. Todd Lohr noted, "We're not just using Microsoft technologies. We're co-investing, co-building and bringing the solutions to market." KPMG has been recognized as a 2024 full-suite Microsoft Solutions Partner, and the two organizations have served more than 3,000 joint clients across a 20-year alliance.

Client results are beginning to surface. When a leading semiconductor manufacturer struggled to maximize Copilot adoption, KPMG's intervention produced a 20% increase in Copilot usage among targeted groups, with initial release teams reporting significant time savings. Carl Carande, Global Head of Advisory at KPMG International, framed the firm's broader generative AI strategy around two pillars: "Trust, making sure that we're creating an environment in which our clients and their customers can trust AI and second, value creation."

For anyone tracking where KPMG's partner-track investment priorities are heading, the AI build-out signals a clear directional bet: Cherie Gartner, KPMG's US Microsoft Platform Leader, put it this way: "We're creating an intelligent frontier — a governed, scalable way of working, where agents operate autonomously in the background.