KPMG's AI report becomes an accidental demo of AI hallucinations

KPMG's October 2025 report on the wonders of agentic AI has been accused of demonstrating one of the tech's less desirable talents: making things up. Research outfit GPTZero claims a forensic review of the Big Four firm's October 2025 report, "Total Experience: Redefining Excellence in the Age of Agentic AI," found that only five of its 45 citations correctly pointed to the cited source; the rest ranged from mangled and misleading to partially fabricated or too vague to verify. The consulting industry has form here. Last year, Deloitte ended up refunding the Australian government after AI-generated content slipped into a taxpayer-funded report. GPTZero dubbed the phenomenon "vibe citing" - the citation equivalent of vibe coding - where generative AI appears to stitch together fragments of real sources, invent titles, or otherwise produce references that look convincing until someone actually clicks them. GPTZero alleges that roughly half of the report's factual claims were false, unsupported, or attributed to the wrong source. Several case studies highlighting supposedly cutting-edge deployments of agentic AI appear to have been particularly creative. Among the examples highlighted by GPTZero were purported agentic AI deployments at UBS, Swiss Federal Railways, and Transport for London. According to GPTZero, the sources cited to support those case studies either did not substantiate the report's claims or contained alterations and paraphrasing that undermined their reliability. These factual errors are not confined to the report's footnoted passages," GPTZero said. On page 42, the authors claim that Emirates airline has adopted a mobile chatbot named Sara (false) that can converse directly with passengers (partially true) and change their flights (false). In fact, Sara is a robot assistant introduced by Emirates in 2023 (not a chatbot) that lacks the ability to alter flight bookings." Not all of the alleged problems involved external sources. GPTZero noted that the report appears to contradict KPMG's own research, citing a figure of 55 percent of CEOs ranking AI as their top investment priority. KPMG's 2025 CEO Outlook, released the same month, put the number at 71 percent. KPMG has since removed the report from some of its websites while it investigates how the publication made it into the wild, according to the Financial Times. A spokesperson at KPMG told The Register: "KPMG International takes the accuracy and integrity of its published content seriously. The report has been removed and we are reviewing the circumstances surrounding its publication. 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." Consulting firms have spent years warning clients about AI hallucinations. According to GPTZero, KPMG may have just provided a live demonstration. (R)