--- title: "KPMG’s New Global CEO Runs 276,000 People Who Don’t Exactly Work for Him" description: "Gary Wingrove inherits AI disruption, a soft consulting market and an Australian confidentiality scandal" author: "Nate Ledger" published: 2026-10-05T13:01:32Z modified: 2026-10-05T19:12:29Z url: https://rews.cc/a/kpmg-s-new-global-ceo-runs-276-000-people-who-don-t-exactly--ae87fb language: en tags: ["ai", "consulting", "workforce", "audit", "economy", "business"] publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)" --- # KPMG’s New Global CEO Runs 276,000 People Who Don’t Exactly Work for Him *Gary Wingrove inherits AI disruption, a soft consulting market and an Australian confidentiality scandal* By Nate Ledger · October 5, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/kpmg-s-new-global-ceo-runs-276-000-people-who-don-t-exactly--ae87fb ## In brief - Gary Wingrove became KPMG’s global chairman and CEO on October 1, succeeding Bill Thomas after eight years - KPMG is a network of legally separate member firms with over 276,000 employees, so the global CEO rules by persuasion - AI threatens the junior-heavy pyramid that trains future partners, even as it creates consulting demand - Revenue grew 5.1% to $39.8 billion in 2025, led by audit and tax, while advisory lagged rivals at 2.9% - Wingrove must also rebuild trust after Australia’s client-confidentiality scandal, which forced resignations and a 5% staff cut Imagine you are offered the job of chief executive of a company with 276,000 employees. Congratulations. There is one catch, which is that the company is not a company. It is a network of legally separate firms, each owned by its own partners, each subject to its own country’s rules, each run by people who did not hire you and cannot exactly be fired by you. Your job is to be in charge of an organization designed so that no one is in charge of it. This is the actual job Gary Wingrove started on October 1, as global chairman and CEO of KPMG, succeeding Bill Thomas after eight years. Wingrove is a lifer: he joined KPMG in 2000, ran KPMG Australia from 2013 to 2021, and most recently served as international chief operating officer. Big Four leaders get the job by internal election, which means they spend decades accumulating enough trust and personal relationships to win a popularity contest among some of the least popularity-contest-oriented people on earth. Once elected, the job is to hold the network together, watch its performance, and parachute into crises. KPMG did not respond to Business Insider’s request for comment, which is fine; the crises speak for themselves. ## The pyramid problem The big one is AI, in both directions at once. The opportunity is obvious: every company in the world wants to hire consultants to explain AI to them. The problem is subtler and has to do with how accounting firms make people. The Big Four run on a pyramid — vast numbers of junior staff doing research-heavy analytical work, a few of whom climb to partner. “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,” James Ransome, a partner and consulting lead at search firm Patrick Morgan, told Business Insider. If the bottom of the pyramid is automated, where do the future partners come from? The firms call themselves “client zero” for AI — whatever AI does to the workforce, it does to them first — which is a nicer way of saying they are the lab rats. Meanwhile the market is unkind. KPMG is the smallest of the Big Four by headcount and revenue. Its 2025 revenue grew 5.1% to $39.8 billion, slightly faster than PwC or EY — but the composition is telling. Audit rose 6% and tax grew 7.5%, well ahead of EY and Deloitte at around 5.5% and PwC at 1%, while advisory grew just 2.9%, lagging rivals. The growth is in the old businesses, not the new ones, even as AI disrupts the time-based billing the industry runs on and economic uncertainty squeezes prices just as the firms need to spend heavily on technology, as Emma Carroll of Source Global Research noted. Demand is not the issue, Carroll said — two-thirds of organizations expect their use of external support to grow over the next 12 to 18 months, and none expect it to shrink. ## Holding it together Then there is the federation problem. Rivals are centralizing: PwC US said in September it would merge its India offshoring center into PwC India, and EY’s global CEO Janet Truncale has consolidated 18 regions into 10 superregions. KPMG, per K2 Consulting Research’s Tom Rodenhauser, is the least integrated of the four — siloed practices run by partners with tight control of their own fiefs. Wingrove’s answer, announced in a first-day video, is “Connected 2030,” a strategy to make KPMG a “more connected, agile and innovative global organization,” which is the sort of sentence global chairmen say precisely because they cannot order anyone to do anything. Rodenhauser suggests the fragmentation could even be an advantage if KPMG specializes rather than chasing one-stop-shop status. And finally, the trouble Down Under — awkward, since Wingrove used to run the place. In March 2026, Labor senator Deborah O’Neill aired whistleblower allegations that KPMG Australia partners had accessed and shared confidential client information internally to win audit work. The whistleblower had raised concerns internally since 2024, and KPMG has since admitted its initial investigation wasn’t rigorous enough and that client information was inappropriately shared. The fallout — led in reporting by the Australian Financial Review — has included leadership resignations, regulatory and parliamentary scrutiny, relationship reviews by major clients and, in August, a roughly 5% workforce cut at KPMG Australia. “Reputational issues in one market can quickly become a broader global brand issue,” Ransome said — and brand is, in the end, the only asset a network of legally separate firms actually shares. So the job description, restated: convince 276,000 people who don’t work for you to adopt AI faster than it eats their business model, centralize a firm whose constitution forbids centralization, and restore trust broken in the one market you know best. Eight years of Bill Thomas made it look easy. It was not easy.