Management and professional-services consulting as a deployer of AI and as an intermediary in other sectors' adoption.
Deployment
The Big Four — PwC, Deloitte, EY, and KPMG — "have built out AI practices" (Professional Services AI Adoption), alongside the strategy firms. Consulting sits within the broader professional-services category, which faces "differing combinations of fee-pressure, regulatory friction, professional-liability exposure" that shape how quickly and in what form AI is adopted.
The three-way position
Consulting occupies a position no other sector does, and it complicates the evidence base rather than only the sector's own economics. Consultancies are large AI deployers in their own right; they are the principal channel through which client sectors adopt AI; and they sell AI-adoption advisory services. Much of the widely cited enterprise-adoption evidence originates from firms with a commercial interest in the rate of adoption they are measuring — a provenance caution that applies to consulting-sourced figures in the same way the wiki applies it to vendor-commissioned ROI studies such as The Legora ROI Report: Measuring the Impact of AI on Law Firms.
The billable-model exposure is also direct: like law, consulting has historically priced on time, so tools that compress the hours required for a deliverable put revenue and cost on the same side of the ledger. See The Billable Hour.