KPMG Canada has formed a strategic collaboration with OpenAI aimed at helping Canadian organizations move from AI experimentation to enterprise-wide deployment.
The company has been named an OpenAI Elite Partner, the highest tier within the OpenAI Partner Network.
The alliance combines OpenAI's technology with KPMG's experience in business transformation, governance, and risk management, with the goal of embedding AI more deeply into the systems and workflows organizations already use, rather than treating it as a standalone pilot project. KPMG said the aim is to reduce manual work and make AI a more practical, everyday part of how client organizations operate.
KPMG Canada plans to draw on its own internal AI rollout to inform how it advises clients, having deployed ChatGPT Enterprise to more than 3,000 employees firmwide. In its Deal Advisory practice, teams already use OpenAI's Codex platform to review large volumes of transaction documents and financial data, cutting review time while freeing staff to focus on risk evaluation and deal analysis.
Stephanie Terrill, Canadian managing partner of Digital Transformation at KPMG Canada, said the firm's own AI transformation has shown what it takes to deploy and scale AI within an organization. She said the experience gained from scaling OpenAI technologies across Canada and building Codex-enabled workflows in Deal Advisory gives KPMG practical insight it can apply to help clients unlock more value from AI.
The partnership also extends to cybersecurity. As part of the OpenAI Daybreak Cyber Partner Program, KPMG will help integrate OpenAI models and cyber capabilities into AI-powered cybersecurity solutions, supporting clients in managing risk and responding to an increasingly complex threat landscape.
Ksenia Chumachenko, head of global alliances at OpenAI, said Canadian organizations are ready to move beyond pilots and put AI into production at enterprise scale. She said the next frontier involves embedding intelligence and AI agents directly into the workflows where decisions are made and work gets done, and that KPMG Canada brings the industry expertise, governance, and transformation capabilities needed to make that shift enterprise-ready across businesses and public-sector organizations.
The collaboration lands as Canadian insurers, among KPMG's core financial services clients, are already among the country's most advanced adopters of generative AI. KPMG's 2025 GenAI Business Survey found Canadian insurance organizations leading in advanced GenAI adoption, with 30% reporting full integration of the technology across core operations and workflows, ahead of banks, which remain mostly in partial adoption focused on productivity and sales.
That adoption has not been without friction. A separate KPMG report on intelligent insurance found that while all surveyed leaders believe firms embracing AI will gain a competitive edge, only 25% said they fully trust AI within their own organizations, and 82% say robust governance frameworks are needed to ensure regulatory compliance and responsible deployment. KPMG has outlined a three-phase model for insurers navigating this shift, moving from enabling AI foundations through embedding it into workflows to evolving toward broader strategic use.
That adoption curve is about to meet a significant regulatory deadline. The Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions released its final Guideline E-23 on Model Risk Management in September 2025, extending requirements beyond deposit-taking institutions for the first time to cover all federally regulated insurers, including life, property and casualty, and fraternal companies.
The guideline applies to every model carrying meaningful risk, not just those requiring formal regulatory approval, capturing everything from actuarial pricing and underwriting algorithms to claims prediction systems, catastrophe models, and third-party or vendor AI tools such as large language models used to triage claims queues.
Federally regulated insurers face a May 1, 2027 compliance deadline, and OSFI's 2026-2027 Annual Risk Outlook has confirmed plans for thematic monitoring of AI use in underwriting at selected P&C companies alongside targeted cyber and technology risk reviews.
For Canadian insurers, the KPMG-OpenAI alliance signals that the infrastructure and advisory capacity supporting AI deployment is scaling alongside insurer demand, particularly in claims processing, underwriting analysis and deal due diligence, where document-heavy workflows overlap closely with the Codex-based capabilities KPMG has already deployed internally.
But the timing also means insurers adopting AI more deeply now will need to build model inventories, governance documentation and validation processes capable of satisfying OSFI's E-23 requirements well before the 2027 deadline.
Advisors able to pair AI deployment experience with model risk governance expertise, as KPMG is positioning itself to do, are likely to become increasingly relevant to insurers trying to scale AI adoption without falling short of a regulatory framework that now treats AI models with the same scrutiny historically reserved for capital and actuarial models.
