Early Adoption Stage of AI Technologies in a Small-Scale Management Consultin

Sammanfattning

Data intensive technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), are undergoing a strikingly fast-paced development and are beginning to be used in different kinds of organizations. One such domain that is experiencing this transformation is management consulting. The relevant literature often focuses on larger firms that utilize their vast resources to participate in the AI race. However, smaller firms with less resources, which are also looking to adopt these technologies in order to remain competitive next to the giants, are understudied. This leaves a gap in our understanding of how smaller consultancy firms are adopting AI technologies. To help to close this gap a small management consulting firm (called The Firm in the thesis) and their adoption process of artificial intelligence technologies has been chosen as a focus of this study. The Firm’s operations have been analyzed in order to find fitting AI tools, as well as what factors influence the adoption process at The Firm. The findings of this study uncover some possible uses for AI tools such as generative AI, transcription tools, AI assistants, and more in tasks commonly performed by management consultants or knowledge analysts. The application of these tools can result in more efficient operations and saved time for management consultants, as well as providing direction for their research. The adoption process of these innovations by The Firm has also been analyzed. Albeit the recent uptake of AI in public and business discourses, this study shows that adopting AI tools is a challengingand lengthy process. Extensive experimentation and testing is essential to finding potential use cases, resulting in employees developing heterogeneous attitudes to the use of AI tools in the process. My hope is that the outcomes of this study can be transferrable to other firms or organizations of similar size and in knowledge-intensive fields looking to explore such technologies and decide whether to start their own AI journeys or not.