(Bloomberg) — When Tony Cowell retired in 2023 from a three-decade career advising private equity and hedge funds from the Cayman Islands at KPMG LLP, AI was still relatively nascent.

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Three years on, with agentic artificial intelligence talk dominating boardrooms and dinner tables, he’s back. Cowell is betting on a new financial and strategy advisory firm catering to the next generation of wealthy families, underpinned by AI tech. His model will give clients deeper access to senior leaders, bypassing what he says are the traditional layers of junior staffers at larger consulting firms.

“If the technology hadn’t moved on I may not have done it,” Cowell, the former regional asset-management head at KPMG, said by phone. “We could build things from the start that we think the world needs today” which is “much harder to retrofit.”

His firm, Cynren, is one of several boutiques seeking to make its mark in a crowded — and in some cases troubled — consulting market, where larger rivals are rushing to equip staff with new tools and help clients harness new technologies as AI disrupts traditional working patterns. Layoffs are already taking place at some firms thanks to AI adoption and the industry’s pyramid staffing model coming under pressure.

As they seek to keep up, incumbents like EY, Deloitte LLP, KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP have invested heavily in AI tools for their staff and struck deals with tech firms to get priority access to new models.

McKinsey & Co. and Deloitte partnered with Google Cloud to get early access to Gemini AI tools, while PwC is partnering with OpenAI to work on automating finance functions.

At Cynren, Cowell is working to build his leadership team and offering. He tapped Stephen Toebes, former chief engineer at Marc Lore’s Wonder Group Inc., to advise on developing its own AI technology and help lead an internal AI lab to develop tools for clients. That includes monitoring world events in real-time, test scenarios, model outcomes and guide decision-making — all with human oversight.

Arnaud van Dijk, another KPMG partner, and Lexi Bowes-Lyon have also joined to establish the sustainability and impact advisory practices. Citigroup Inc. veteran and private equity executive Sunil Nair is co-CEO with Cowell. Leo Pearlman, the co-chief executive of the LeBron James-backed production company Fulwell Entertainment, is advising on sports, media and entertainment.

“There’s no shortage of opportunity in the sectors I work in,” Pearlman said by e-mail. Cynren was built “to move at the pace the entertainment industry now demands for important capital decisions.”

Impact for Families

Besides services for family offices, the firm is seeking to grow in strategy, risk, fiduciary and impact for families, businesses and organizations. It plans to avoid audits to dodge any potential conflicts of interest, and said it will consider acquisitions to expand.

With an historic wealth transfer under way, demand from the next generation of wealth owners to build a reputation and legacy through impact investing is booming, according to Cowell, who also led KPMG Impact for the Islands Group.

“The old way of doing philanthropy was slightly removed,” said Bowes-Lyon. “Now they’re looking at not just how to invest, but how to be part of the structure themselves. They want to be able to control the outcomes.”

The firm is using AI to help, for example, a large family client identify which organizations around the world best fits its values and then using networks to connect with senior leadership and find other partners to co-invest alongside them.

By Cowell’s reckoning it took 10 to 15 agents and a quarter of the time it would’ve taken a traditional advisory firm to deliver.

(Adds detail on consultancy partnerships, Pearlman comment.)

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