PwC and Anthropic target enterprise tech debt with Claude Code rollout

On Thursday, PwC and Anthropic deepened their collaboration, allowing thousands of consultants to leverage the capabilities of Claude AI in revamping old enterprise systems.

PwC will first certify 30,000 US employees on Claude Code, Anthropic’s AI coding agent, then extend access to its full workforce of 364,000 across 136 countries.

The companies noted that the partnership will aim to tackle more than $2 trillion in enterprise tech debt worldwide, resulting from costly inefficiencies caused by legacy systems, data silos, and manual processes.

McKinsey research has found large companies spend 10% to 20% of their technology budgets keeping old systems running rather than building new ones.

Insurance underwriting dropped from 10 weeks to 10 days

The partnership covers three areas: AI tools for software engineering teams, AI in mergers and acquisitions work, including due diligence, and the replacement of legacy finance, HR, and supply chain systems.

PwC is also launching a new Office of the CFO business group built around Claude, focused first on banking, insurance, and healthcare.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said some clients are already seeing results in production, not pilots. “Insurance underwriting that took ten weeks now takes ten days. Security work that took hours now takes minutes,” Amodei said.

A stalled HR project was restarted with a working prototype in one week. A COBOL mainframe migration is reportedly running on time and under budget despite a larger-than-expected workload.

As Cryptopolitan reported in February, Claude Cowork already connects with Microsoft Office, Google Drive, and other enterprise tools, but scaling from pilot projects to company-wide deployment is where most AI initiatives stall.

Every major consulting firm now has an AI lab deal

Deloitte signed a Claude deployment covering its 470,000 employees last October. IBM embedded Claude models in its developer tools the same month.

Goldman Sachs has had Anthropic engineers embedded inside the bank for six months, building AI agents for trade accounting and client onboarding.

OpenAI is competing for the same channel. It holds partnerships with Accenture, Capgemini, BCG, McKinsey, and PwC itself. Google recently launched a $750 million program to help consulting firms deploy AI for clients.

Anthropic has leaned into compliance and safety as differentiators for regulated industries.

Business Insider reported Anthropic reached 34.4% enterprise adoption in April per the Ramp AI Index, edging past OpenAI at 32.3%. Claude Code was cited as the primary driver.

Advocate Health, with its workforce of 167,000, is one of the first health-care companies to embrace widespread Claude adoption. Over 5,000 partners and other senior leaders from PwC have reportedly finished AI training sessions.

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