The big firms are naming the compute crunch so they can sell you the cure forever.

KPMG, Deloitte, Wipro, BCG, and PwC are dressing the bottleneck in vocabulary that keeps them in the room long after the build is done.

Every large advisory firm keeps a class of language that sounds like a capability and functions as a lease. KPMG talks about operating-model debt, a framing in which the problem is never finished because debt always needs servicing, so the diagnostic becomes the recurring deliverable rather than the fix that ends it. Deloitte positions behavior-level governance as the monitoring layer that runs on top of a deployed AI system, which is another way of describing a subscription. The vocabulary differs by firm. The economic function is identical: you cannot operate the layer without the firm still in the room.

BCG showed the trend at its clearest. Sylvain Duranton, who leads the firm's technology build unit, has been urging companies to start measuring and ramping their AI token consumption, the raw usage that drives AI cost, and the idea, nicknamed tokenmaxxing, broke into mainstream business press this spring. Measuring cost is sensible on its own. The move underneath it is that BCG proposes a metric the client does not currently track, then positions itself to benchmark the client against it every quarter.

Wipro wraps its very large workforce in governance language. Its privacy and AI governance lead, Ivana Bartoletti, has set out sound principles for agentic AI: systems should be legible, auditable, and designed to fail safely. The principles are correct. The open question is who staffs the oversight, because a firm with a workforce of well over 200,000 has an obvious incentive to answer that it does. PwC, meanwhile, supplies the number that opens every one of these conversations. Its 2026 study found that 20 percent of companies capture 74 percent of AI's economic value, and that the most AI-fit deliver roughly 7.2 times the performance of the rest. The gap is real. It is also the entry point to an assessment, a roadmap, and an engagement that PwC administers.

There is one clean diagnostic that cuts through all of it. Ask what you own the day the engagement ends. If the answer is an artifact you can version, replay, and run without the firm, it is not a lease. If the answer is a relationship, a subscription, or a quarterly briefing, it is, no matter how the capability is described.