Avocado Consulting acquires AI Consulting Group to launch a Data and AI practice

SYDNEY, 3 November 2026 — Australian-owned IT professional services firm Avocado Consulting has acquired AI Consulting Group (AICG), a specialist Data and AI consultancy. AI Consulting Group has spent more than eight years delivering AI solutions across a wide range of sectors, including retail, finance, government and mining. The acquisition establishes a new Data and AI practice within Avocado, led by AICG founder Rad Anandakumar.

The acquisition will see 20 AI specialists join Avocado from AI Consulting Group, taking the combined team to more than 170 consultants. “It’s a proven formula, and combining as one team we can widen our AI reach and simplify our go-to-market,” Barranquero said. “We just completed the first phase of a large hospitality project, where AICG brought their data and AI expertise and Avocado brought our cyber security skills. Going forward it will be a unified team delivering into the client.”

The acquisition comes as Australian organisations shift from experimenting with AI to running it in production. They are discovering that deploying AI is the easy part, and the complexity comes from monitoring the agents and the spend.

“Providing both AI solutions and end-to-end observability will place Avocado in a unique position,” Barranquero said.

The two businesses bring different strengths. AICG has earned the trust of organisations including BHP, the NRL, Fremantle Ports, Downer Group and the Department of Education. Its team works across Generative AI, large language models, AI agents, machine learning, machine vision and modern data platforms, and has built a proprietary AI agent platform, Express Agent, for the retail sector. Avocado has spent 22 years keeping critical systems secure, resilient and running for large enterprise and government clients.

The new Avocado Data and AI practice will offer organisations an AI readiness and feasibility study; data lakes to align data sources; process re-engineering to maximise the benefits of AI solutions; development and testing consultants to build, test and secure AI solutions; and AI governance and observability to create proper guardrails and visibility into AI operations, decisions and cost.

As an Australian owned and based business, Avocado is also well placed to support state and federal government agencies — avoiding data sovereignty issues by ensuring all AI solutions are hosted on Australian infrastructure.

AI Consulting Group will continue to operate under its current brand initially, and will identify as an Avocado company going forward.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.