TL;DR

Up to half of what UK businesses paid AI companies in September went to Anthropic, according to the latest Business Spend Pulse that City AM published on Tuesday 6 October. ChatGPT’s share fell from 60% to 36%. Over the same month, only 4.2% of firms paid for management consultants or PR services.

The September numbers

The tracker draws on Capital on Tap card transactions from more than 300,000 British firms. Capital on Tap’s customers are SMEs, so the series tracks what smaller businesses actually pay for rather than what they tell surveys.

More than one in seven businesses paid one of the major AI providers in September, against 8% a year earlier. Damian Brychcy, Capital on Tap’s chief executive, said each AI-using firm is also spending more, with the typical one now paying about twice what it did a year ago.

Consultancy was squeezed from both sides. Fewer customers bought consulting and PR, and the consulting sector cut its own outgoings by almost 4%, the steepest reduction of any sector. Total business spending, by contrast, rose 3.1% on a year earlier, with food retailers up 9.3% and property developers up 7.9%.

How it compares with August

City AM’s August reading, which we covered at the time, had median consulting fees down 1.9% even as total spending rose 2.2%, with Milton Keynes and Edinburgh the nearest challengers to London on AI use. London still leads in September, with more than one in five firms paying for AI, but Milton Keynes rose from 16.3% to 17.2% and Edinburgh from 16.1% to 17.1%, each up about a point in a month.

City AM’s headline links the drop in consulting and PR spend to AI tools. The data shows the two moving in opposite directions; it does not show firms cancelling one to pay for the other.

Looking forward

In our view, the striking number is the vendor split. A single month’s card data cannot settle a market-share question, and a falling share of spend could mean firms are spending more with Anthropic rather than leaving ChatGPT. Either way, the money is no longer concentrated with the best-known name. Two monthly readings in a row now show consulting under pressure while about one in seven firms pays for AI, roughly double the rate of a year before. If October follows the same pattern, consultancies that rely on small-business clients will have a harder case to make.