Why not a Big4 AI partner
An honest comparison for organisations between 50 and 5,000 employees deciding between Impetora and a named consultancy.
What you get with a Big4
A partner-relationship at the top, with eight to fifteen juniors doing the actual work underneath. Slide decks, well-structured discovery, references from Fortune 500 buyers, and the full audit-firm liability cover that comes with a name like Deloitte, EY, PwC, KPMG, McKinsey, BCG, or Accenture.
A six-figure floor on engagement size. A six-to-nine-month default delivery cycle. Bench rotation between months three and twelve, which means the people you met in the pitch are not necessarily the people on the project by the time it ships.
What you get with Impetora
The founder is the engineer. The same person scopes the brief, writes the code, signs the DPA, and runs the production handover. There is no partner layer, no junior bench, and no slide deck as the deliverable.
Engagement size scales down to a single bounded workflow. First production code lands in week two of an eight-week typical bounded engagement, not month three of a nine-month one. The same person is in week one and week twelve.
Where Big4 wins
Boards that need a known logo for risk-committee approval. Regulator-mandated independence requirements that conflict with the same firm building and reviewing. Programmes spanning multiple business units across multiple jurisdictions simultaneously.
Organisations where a signed-off compliance trail matters more than shipped working software. If that is the decision-making culture, a Big4 is the right answer and we will say so.
Where Impetora wins
Buyers who can hold an architectural conversation with a single technical owner. Projects with a clear bounded scope: one workflow, one regulator alignment, one production handover. Organisations that have been burned by a deck-and-juniors engagement and want a working system in a quarter.
EU buyers who want a build firm rooted in EU regulatory shape (EU AI Act, GDPR, EBA, EIOPA, DORA) rather than a US-headquartered firm bolting an EU practice onto a global delivery model.
The trade-off in one sentence
You can hire a partner, or you can hire the engineer who ships the system. Pick the one that matches your decision-making culture.
What this means in practice
A Big4 RFP runs six to twelve weeks before any work begins. Impetora's intake form is one page and gets a written brief back within five working days.
A Big4 engagement floor is typically 250 to 500 thousand euro for a defensible AI workstream. Impetora scopes single-workflow engagements down to 30 to 60 thousand euro. A Big4 team rotates juniors through your project. The Impetora founder does not rotate off.
When NOT to hire Impetora
Programmes above 1.5 million euro budget. Projects requiring third-party assurance signatures from a registered audit firm. Multi-jurisdiction regulatory conformity programmes spanning three or more EU member states simultaneously. Organisations with a hard policy against single-vendor key-person concentration.
In those cases, pick a Big4 and skip the call. We would rather lose the brief than mis-sell the engagement.