AI and data capitalism

Through 2023-26, I’ve held a research fellowship at the University of Auckland, and working with Prof Nick Lewis within the Politics, Economies and Place research group. Work has focused on global management consultancies’ role in ‘imagineering’ a post-neoliberal capitalism:

From tech hype to statecraft: The Big Four, AI futurism, and the reproduction of consultancy capital [Paper in preparation]

Critical accounts of artificial intelligence rightly focus on platform monopolies, technological extractivism, and compute footprints, however, the institutional intermediaries translating raw tech hype into statecraft remain underexamined. In this paper, we interrogate how the "Big Four" Global Management Consultancies (GMCs) frame and commodify AI across their marketing, reports and service lines. We argue that GMCs perform active market-making, constructing an institutionalised "AI futurism" – a socio-technical imaginary that sanitises frontier Silicon Valley disruption into governance-friendly, techno-rationalist fixes. Beyond mere efficiency gains, firms deploy eco-modernist discourses of "sustainable abundance," championing AI as a post-scarcity engine capable of decoupling economic growth from ecological limit.
Analysing their promotional literature, we show how GMCs embed AI into extant workflows –from ESG compliance to public sector reform – while leveraging structural uncertainty to sell advisory services. We demonstrate that this corporate techno-optimism functions as a legitimatory ideology. By acting as boundary objects, these narratives broker alignment between finance, state apparatuses, and traditional industry, accommodating the state's central role in subsidising compute infrastructure. Ultimately, we argue that the promotion of AI utopias serves as a mechanism for capital accumulation and institutional self-preservation. By packaging AI as an essential economic techno-fix, the Big Four reproduce the conditions for their own indispensability, embedding themselves at the operational core of contemporary digital capitalism.