Chasing the Hallucinations: KPMG's AI-Powered Attempt at "Redefining Excellence"

-->

Search

Search

Dashboard

Table of contents

Over the past year, a team of GPTZero investigators has used our Hallucination Check tool to uncover hallucinated citations in government reports, academic papers submitted to prestigious machine learning / artificial intelligence conferences like ICLR and NeurIPS, and research products from two of the big four consulting firms: Deloitte and Ernst & Young. This is the second in a series of investigations into reports containing hallucinated citations surfaced by an automated search pipeline.<br>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.<br>These findings raise an important question: if a citation generally points to a real source (but includes paraphrased or fabricated components) can it still be a hallucination?

At GPTZero, our answer is “yes”, although we acknowledge that some hallucinations are more obvious than others. We use the term “vibe citing” to describe the accidental creation of fake references via LLM hallucinations across a spectrum of severity. Vibe Citations can include references that are entirely fabricated (fake authors, fake title, and fake container/locators), fusions of two or more real references (authors of paper A paired with the title of paper B), or paraphrased or heavily altered versions of real citations. Our definition excludes common human errors.

On the Menu: KPMG

One of the “big four” consulting firms, KPMG is a global organization of member firms operating in 138 countries and employing more than 250,000 people. These member firms are coordinated by KPMG International, an English private company headquartered in London.

In October 2025, KPMG International published Total Experience: Redefining Excellence in the Age of Agentic AI to summarize the latest findings from the firm’s long-running Global Customer Experience Excellence (CEE) study. The report is available in several versions, including a global report and localized variants like this Belgian version. The localized variants are generally identical apart from the authorship of the Foreword and the contact information on the report’s back cover.

89%

Flawed

GPTZero Hallucination Check Scan

56%

Mixed

GPTZero AI Scan

KPMG’s Vibe Citations<br>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.<br>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.<br>GPTZero’s Hallucination Check classifies citations with paraphrased titles or incorrect authors as possible hallucinations (here are the technical details). For this reason, most of Total Experience’s 45 citations are highlighted red by our tool.<br>The table below shows our assessment of each citation using four categories: "Exist," "Unsure," "Hallucination," or "Unable to determine." To be as fair as possible to KPMG, we've used a stricter definition of "hallucination" than we do for academic citations (which generally include more information and cite sources with greater permanence).

Citation Text<br>Verdict<br>Justification<br>Potential Match

Salesforce. C-suite AI Priorities in 2025: YouGov Research. Salesforce, February 2025.<br>Hallucination<br>Title is wrong. Report was produced by YouGov for Salesforce.<br>Salesforce x YouGov ANZ AI C-suite Research_Report_ANZ_Final (February 2025).pptx

Intellihub. Zelora: Home Electrification Made Accessible...