"We Teach You the Future": Production and Diffusion of Management Consulting Firms' AI Discourses

Abstract: Recognized as creators and disseminators of management knowledge, management consulting firms make a significant impact on what managers see as critical issues and how they act in management practices. As catalysts endeavoring for the development and adoption of artificial intelligence (AI), management consulting firms have published a dramatically increasing number of articles on this topic in recent years. The purpose of this study is to probe the production and diffusion of the AI discourses manifested in the business articles of management consulting firms. Grounded in the literature on AI, institutions, discourses, and social networks, this study performed a discourse analysis of 81 AI-related articles from McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group (BCG), and Bain, facilitated by a quantitative word group analysis of 737 articles. The results suggest that as institutional agents in the uncertain and immature environments of AI, management consulting firms are producing AI discourses with their cohesive academic and corporate network and diffusing the discourses to the broad network to create homogeneous institutions with intrinsic irrationality.