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BDO, the midmarket-focused professional services firm, is launching a major expansion of its Microsoft consulting practice.

BDO started out as a mostly pure-play accounting firm and, like its Big Four competitors, gradually branched out into other parts of the consulting market. Today, it has more than 110,000 staffers in 150-plus countries who focus on areas as varied as IT modernization and management consulting.

Several thousand of those employees work at BDO’s Microsoft consulting practice, which helps midmarket companies implement Microsoft software and cloud services. The firm is now moving to expand this practice.

BDO said in a press release that it will “extend the operation of BDO’s Microsoft Advisory Services to provide clients with deeper access to more than 10,000 experienced BDO technology Consulting professionals.” Additionally, it will provide clients in the US, Canada, UK, Netherlands, and Australia with help implementing Microsoft OpenAI Service. This offering provide access to OpenAI generative AI models hosted in Microsoft data centers.

Notably, BDO also said that it will train more than 5,000 additional employees in using Microsoft technologies. This can be interpreted a couple ways.

One possibility is that BDO is looking to add more personnel to its Microsoft consulting business. In other words, the employee training initiative could be about teaching staffers how to assist corporate clients with Microsoft software rollouts.

It’s also possible BDO simply wants to train employees in how to incorporate Microsoft products into their own day-to-day work. Microsoft offers AI tools that speed up mundane chores such as writing marketing copy and BDO may have determined those tools can make its staffers more productive.

BDO estimates that the planned expansion of its Microsoft capabilities could open a “$1 billion growth opportunity”. This presumably refers to revenue, which would mean the firm is looking to win more technology consulting deals involving Microsoft products.

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