British businesses are reducing their expenditure on public relations and consultancy firms, according to City AM's latest Business Spend Pulse. In September, the proportion of UK firms allocating funds to management consultants and PR services dropped to just 4.2 per cent.
This decline occurred despite an overall 3.1 per cent year-on-year increase in total business spending. The consulting sector experienced the largest spending cut of any sector, paring back by almost 4 per cent in September.
Concurrently, spending on AI services saw a significant rise, with more than one in seven businesses utilising these tools in September, up from eight per cent a year prior. Anthropic emerged as the primary beneficiary, accounting for approximately half of all spending on AI firms.