“The acquisition made a lot of sense on many fronts”: Avocado Consulting acquires AI Consulting Group

Through this acquisition Avocado Consulting launches a new AI and Data practice.

ITSP Avocado Consulting has acquired the AI Consulting Group (AICG) to help deliver AI to their clients, creating a new data and AI practice.

According to Gerardo Barranquero, CEO, Avocado Consulting acquiring AICG made a lot of sense on many fronts.

“AI is moving so fast that trying to build a Data and AI practice organically would be impossible. Hiring for AI staff is the current talent shortage is also challenge that would have slowed us down,” he said.

Avocado and AICG have been collaborating for the past three years, Barranquero said they saw that combining their teams created much more capability than either business could alone.

“AI Consulting Group has seen strong demand for its expertise, and joining Avocado gives them the scale, reach and delivery support to take on bigger and higher profile engagements,” he said.

The acquisition will see a team of 20 join Avocado from AI Consulting Group taking the combined team to more than 170 consultants.

“We’ve brought the whole team across, including admin and sales, not just the consultants,” Barranquero said.

“We know their capabilities well from working alongside them, and we think they’re just as excited as we are to be joining forces.

“We are keeping the AICG brand so there is little change for them in day-to-day activities. It will be the size the projects they work on that will change.”

Through this acquisition, Barranquero said they hope to combine the Avocado delivery capability with the AICG innovation to “reimagine that way client processes and operations need to work to attain a maximum return on their AI investments”.

“We are also building Agentic AI solutions, designed specifically for each client rather than generic use cases. Together we can offer clients one team that spans AI, data, security, observability and delivery,” he said.

“So many organisations are trapped in proof of concept that don’t consider the real-world implementations. Avocado’s 20 plus years of experience will help guide clients to deliver their AI innovations with confidence.”

This deal has seen Avocado Consulting change its tagline from “deliver with certainty” to “deliver AI with certainty”.

New data and AI practice

Through this acquisition, Avocado has created a new data and AI practice within the business.

The new data and AI practice will be led by AICG founder Rad Anandakumar.

According to Barranquero, the practice spans three areas: data foundations, AI engineering, and AI adoption and governance.

“The key differentiator is that AI Consulting Group doesn’t just bring advisory,” he said.

“They bring deep technical knowledge as their consultants have been working with data, IoT, AI, machine learning and generative AI for more than eight years. They build bespoke AI solutions and solve complex problems others say can’t be done.”

The acquisition also brings AI Consulting Group’s express agent platform into Avocado – a retail specific agent with a track record for increasing basket sizes.

“We will expand these offering to other sectors to provide a unique customer experience that grows revenue. We want to tackle both cost reduction and revenue growth with our AI solutions,” Barranquero said.