The Consultancy Census
Who actually does AI consulting
Every firm we can verify with a real AI practice, sorted into the categories buyers actually think in. There is no league table here and there never will be: no scores, no ordering by size, no "best". Ranking businesses on a methodology we could not defend would be the one page on this site that deserved the scepticism the rest of it aims at everybody else.
Read this before drawing conclusions. Presence here is not an endorsement, and absence is not a judgement — it almost always means we have not got to them yet. Nobody pays to be listed and nobody can pay to be removed. The categories are ours and they are rough: several firms genuinely span two, and we put them where a buyer would look first. If you are missing, miscategorised, or think you should not be here at all, tell us and we will fix it.
Services firms only. Vendor partner programmes mix consultancies with technology vendors, and only the first kind belongs here. A vector database, an observability platform or a model provider can be an excellent partner to that vendor without being a firm you would hire to deliver a project. Sorting one from the other is a judgement no parser makes reliably, which is the clearest reason this census is curated by hand rather than scraped.
About the partner badges. Where a firm appears on a model vendor's own published partner directory we record it, because that is harder evidence of a real practice than a press release. Some vendors also publish a tier, and we show it rather than quietly dropping an inconvenient fact. Read tiers for what they are. In every partner ecosystem ever built, tier reflects commercial commitment — revenue, certified headcount, co-marketing spend — at least as much as capability. An Elite badge tells you a firm has invested heavily in that relationship. It does not tell you they will do your project well, and a smaller firm two tiers down may be the better hire. Nobody here is ordered by tier, and partner-tagged firms are not ranked above anyone else. Coverage reflects which vendors publish openly rather than who has the most partners.
Who lets you read their partner list
Partner badges can only exist where a vendor publishes a directory an ordinary client can read. That turns out to be rare, which is worth recording in its own right — and it is why one vendor dominates the badges above.
This is public JSON
/consultancies/data.json — the full census with categories and verification status. Free to cite with attribution.
Sibling datasets: the Cert Ledger for credentials, the Adoption Ledger for what the model market runs, and the Wreck Index for how projects actually end.