KPMG Redefines Excellence in the Age of AI By Using AI to Pump Out Dubious Citations in This Now-Removed Report

GPTZero, the folks who brought you this glorious takedown of an EY Canada report stuffed with completely made up sources, are back at it again and this time they’ve caught KPMG using AI to make reports. Except this time it’s funnier because the report is about AI.

Here’s the gist of their latest research:

This investigation analyzes a KPMG report from October 2025 on customer experience and agentic AI. The report, titled Total Experience: Redefining Excellence in the Age of Agentic AI, summarizes the results of an annual study on consumer experience around the world. Of the 45 citations in the report, only five accurately point to real sources. Another 28 citations provide paraphrased titles and/or fake components for a real source. The final 12 are too vague or flawed to accurately determine if a source exists. Additionally, around half of the claims evidenced by the 45 citations appear to be fake or misattributed — likely the result of an AI research tool over-complying with a request to find examples of “agentic AI” in the wild.

This is where it gets a little tricky. Whereas the EY report had clearly fake sources pulled out of AI’s virtual ass, this one is a tad more complicated. Explains GPTZero:

Consulting firms use a condensed citation style that makes source matching difficult. In line with industry norms, the citations in Total Experience are formatted as endnotes and generally provide a title, container (publisher or website name), and a year. Many of the citations also include an author, but the given author overlaps so frequently with the container or title that it is usually redundant. Because the citations are incomplete (lacking “real” authors, URLs, and other identifiers), finding the “real” matching can involve extensive detective work and require certain assumptions about the report’s authors.

The task of citation verification is made even more challenging by citation titles: 40 of 45 are fake. In most cases, the titles seem to be paraphrases that loosely match real sources (as corroborated by context and other citation components). However, between the paraphrased titles, garbled authors, and missing URLs, 12 citations are too ambiguous for either our tool or in-house expert to determine a confident source match.

They then proceed to list all 45 citations. We’ll grab the first 10 of them to give you an example:

GPTZero goes on to explain how all of this is a big problem because the report gets laundered through the wider web and then ingested by LLMs, thus perpetuating the cycle of made-up or sketchy sources:

Publications by prestigious consulting firms that are hosted on high-traffic websites rank highly in search algorithms and AI research queries. It’s therefore no surprise that the claims and statistics included in KPMG’s Total Experience are seeping across the internet and surfacing in news reports, blog posts, and conversations with LLMs. Since publication, the report has been covered by industry publications like CXM, CX Dive, and Mi3, as well as a major Czech newspaper. In these stories, claims, including the 55% statistic mentioned above, have been repeated and recycled.

KPMG’s report is also being cited by LLMs, which can strip claims of context and make them more difficult to corroborate.

KPMG ended up pulling the report after Financial Times wrote this up a few days ago. They told FT that KPMG International “takes the accuracy and integrity of its published content seriously” and that they’ll investigate how this got published in the first place. “We expect all our people to follow our guidelines on the responsible use of AI, including human oversight to validate content and verify independent sources,” said a spokesperson.

OK so guess that confirms that there’s something to these accusations.

GPTZero gives their best guess as to what exactly happened:

The problems caused by these vibe citations are compounded by a relentless series of fake or misattributed claims. It seems likely that an LLM research tool was prompted to find suitable case studies of companies using agentic AI in different markets. This tool seems to have conflated sources, exaggerated claims, and injected references to agentic AI that were copied into the final report without verification. We suspect no human at KPMG double-checked the citations, the claims, or the sources before Total Experience was published.

If Big 4 firms want a piece of the AI consulting market they really need to step up their game.