In a gold rush, you want to be the person who sells shovels. That’s not a new observation and helps explain why Nvidia, maker of artificial intelligence enabling chips, has come from nowhere to a $2.6tn market capitalisation. The next best job, it seems, is telling everyone how the shovels should be used. Enter the consultancy industry — an early beneficiary of the AI revolution.
Boston Consulting Group, for instance, reckons that a fifth of its revenues this year will come from AI-related work. On last year’s revenues of $12.3bn, that would amount to something like $2.5bn. Accenture has booked $2bn of AI-related projects year to date. There is no shortage of examples of consultants benefiting from the AI gold rush.
This reflects AI’s fundamental problem. Tech companies are building a massive infrastructure backbone. Goldman Sachs estimates that $1tn of capex will be put to work in the coming years. Barclays calculates that, by 2026, big tech will have computational capabilities for 12,000 chat-GPT equivalents.