KPMG has retracted a report on enterprise AI after multiple organizations it named said the descriptions of their projects were untrue.
The consulting firm published "Redefining excellence in the age of agentic AI," presenting it as a survey of how large institutions were deploying artificial intelligence. UBS, the UK's National Health Service, Swiss Federal Railways, and Transport for London each said the report's characterizations of their work were either false or misleading. KPMG pulled the report after the organizations spoke out, offering no detailed public explanation.
The damage did not stop at retraction. The now-deleted report was cited in answers generated by ChatGPT and Google Gemini, and picked up as a source by a national newspaper and several trade publications. Fabricated claims carrying KPMG's brand name travel fast, and AI-generated responses amplifying a hallucinated report create a feedback loop that is hard to unwind.
A Big Four consulting firm apparently publishing hallucinated case studies about AI is a scenario the industry spent years insisting was someone else's problem.