Gary Wingrove opens his KPMG tenure with a plan to bind its separate firms closer together

A Big Four global chair is chosen by internal election and leads a network of legally separate firms ^[6][5]. Business Insider notes that this makes the role different from that of a typical corporate chief executive ^[5]. Candidates spend decades building the trust and personal networks needed to win that vote ^[6]. Wingrove came up the usual way. He joined KPMG in 2000, ran KPMG Australia from 2013 to 2021 and was most recently international COO ^[3].

The firms are kept separate for a reason. In audit, member firms have to meet local regulations and independence requirements ^[21]. Global clients want the opposite: cross-border coordination and shared specialist capabilities and technology ^[22]. Rivals have answered with structure. EY's global CEO, Janet Truncale, merged 18 geographical regions into 10 superregions ^[24]. PwC US said in September it plans to merge its India offshoring centre with PwC's Indian branch ^[23]. Wingrove's first move is a strategy, Connected 2030 ^[25]. Business Insider's account does not set out targets or structural changes under the plan, and KPMG did not respond to its request for comment ^[7].

The 2025 results show where KPMG's growth came from. Revenue rose 5.1% to $39.8 billion ^[15]. That was slightly faster than PwC and EY, though KPMG is still the smallest of the four ^[14]. Audit grew 6%. Tax grew 7.5%, against about 5.5% at EY and Deloitte and 1% at PwC ^[16]. Advisory grew 2.9%, slower than at its competitors ^[17], and 4.6 percentage points behind tax ^[26]. Whatever AI work KPMG's consultants won in 2025, advisory still grew more slowly than both audit and tax ^[27].

A skeptic would say demand will close that gap. Emma Carroll, a consultant at Source Global Research, told Business Insider: "There's no shortage of demand. Two-thirds of organizations expect their use of external support to grow in the next 12-18 months; no one expects it to shrink." ^[20] Pricing is the other half. Carroll said economic uncertainty is pushing down on prices just as firms need to spend more on technology, especially AI ^[19]. AI is also squeezing the time-based fees the industry has long depended on ^[18].

The same technology is a staffing problem. The Big Four call themselves "client zero" for AI, so changes to the wider workforce probably reach them first ^[9]. "In consulting, AI is already reducing the value of some of the more junior, research-heavy and analytical work that has traditionally supported the pyramid," said James Ransome, a partner and consulting lead at executive-search firm Patrick Morgan ^[11]. Ransome said the answer will mean rethinking team structures and how junior talent is developed ^[12]. The trade-off plays out over years. A firm can bank the saving from automated junior work this year. The bill comes later, as a thinner pool of future managers and partners, and Wingrove is under pressure to protect that pipeline ^[10]. When his appointment was announced in March, he said he would aim to create an environment where KPMG employees could thrive ^[8].

The network structure also governs how AI gets built. KPMG's US arm has created a Client Technology & Innovation group to build products and services around AI, and says the group will work at the pace of Silicon Valley ^[13]. A product built in one member firm still has to be adopted by the other legally separate firms ^[5]. Wingrove is under pressure to make all of KPMG's firms innovate quickly and cohesively ^[10]. He now speaks for more than 276,000 employees across those firms ^[4].