AI is a wider umbrella of methods and applications, not all is modeling or pattern recognition based - for example a very popular form of machine intelligence was fuzzy logic, that is also AI. It has evolved to using neural networks and unsupervised learning methods to create the membership functions today.

I've worked with EY & PWC, their tech consultants are absolute nonsense that they hired 2 months prior to work on your project. It's no different than a branded manpower bodyshop.

IT is pretty essential to the operation of any company. Things like workstations, printers, office networking, email, and application servers.