TL;DR

The substitution everyone has been predicting is now visible in transaction data. Median consulting fees paid by British businesses fell 1.9% in August year on year, at a time when their overall spending rose 2.2%. Over the same period the proportion of firms paying an AI company climbed from roughly one in thirteen to one in seven.

What the numbers actually show

The figures come from the business card issuer Capital on Tap, and draw on millions of card payments made by over 300,000 UK companies — mostly small and medium-sized ones, which makes this a rare read on SME behaviour rather than boardroom intent.

Professional services took the sharpest hit of any category. Measured against total spending it fell by roughly 10%, and the proportion of businesses paying a professional services firm at all slipped about a percentage point, to 18.6%. Nothing else in the tracker fell that fast.

Two caveats are worth holding. August is a quiet trading month, as Damian Brychcy, who runs Capital on Tap, noted, and a single month’s movement is not a trend. Card spend also captures subscriptions far more cleanly than it captures large invoiced consulting engagements, so the true consulting figure is likely understated at the top end.

Where adoption is concentrated

London leads, with about one in five firms paying for services from the major AI companies. Milton Keynes follows on 16.3%, then Edinburgh on 16.1% and Bristol on 15.7% — a spread that puts three non-London cities within five points of the capital, which is not the usual shape of UK technology adoption maps.

Looking forward

The context makes the direction harder to dismiss. KPMG drew up plans in July to cut roughly 10% of its UK corporate services division, and the smaller consultancy Savannah went insolvent under financial pressure. Read alongside our coverage of Yorkshire firms ranking AI above tax as their leading concern, a pattern emerges: smaller UK businesses are treating AI tools as a direct replacement for bought-in advice rather than as an addition to it. For consultancies, the threat is not that clients stop needing help — it is that the entry-level diagnostic work that used to justify a retainer now arrives inside a monthly subscription.