The sharp uptick in the demand is driven by India Inc changing gears quickly from pilot projects to large, company-wide AI deployments.
“Client engagement around AI has roughly doubled over the past year. Increasingly, companies are now looking at AI as something that must be embedded into their main strategy. It’s no longer a side initiative,” said Rajiv Memani, chairman and CEO, EY (India region).
Wider Integration
There is a similar high client engagement story unfolding at Deloitte.
“In the first five months of the current year the firm booked ₹6,000 crore in technology sales. Of this, 27%, or around $160 million, was ‘AI-influenced’ work. The pipeline is even stronger. Out of a $2.8 billion pipeline, roughly 30% now has a GenAI or agentic AI component, and we expect that to rise to close to 60% in the future,” said Romal Shetty, CEO, Deloitte South Asia.
Deloitte India follows a June to May financial cycle.
He added that for Deloitte, AI-influenced means the project includes a material decision-making or reasoning layer built using AI.
Consultants said clients now don’t just want standalone AI pilots, but AI integrated into wider transformation work spanning ERP, supply-chain analytics, customer relationship management and compliance.
“We have seen 250% growth in AI-led transformation services. If we include AI and deep-analytics work, we have generated revenues of over ₹600 crore in the India practice last year,” said Sanjeev Krishan, chairman, PwC India. “Over the last two years, we have invested heavily in India and at the network level, and that has helped drive growth.”
Today, consultants said even for a traditional ERP implementation, tech consulting clients don’t want the old model. “They ask three things: modernise my data, build GenAI, and build agentic layers,” said Deloitte’s Shetty.
Suddenly, firms are finding that AI has been injected into almost every technology consulting engagement, as clients seek quick impact, a high degree of automation and measurable returns on digital investments. “AI is now digital transformation,” said Memani. “That is how clients are looking at it.”
ENTERPRISE TRANSFORMATION
“At KPMG, more than 80% of our technology consulting partners are working on projects with some AI component,” said Hemant Jhajhria, partner and head of consulting at KPMG in India. “In the last 14–15 months, anything that touches AI has grown nearly 20 times for KPMG India. We already have more than 200 AI use cases with leading companies, and across every function, partners are working on AI-led projects.”
Initially, companies started with a lot of POCs, then they tried enterprise transformation across the stack, and now the smart ones are saying let’s narrow the scope, go to market fast, let’s narrow the risk but take initiative, he added.
And the ROI question is now beginning to crop up in all AI implementation conversations. “Deloitte is now steering clients away from “cute but unscalable” AI experiments. We ask two questions: Are you solving a business problem or a tech problem? And is this scalable? AI has token costs—it is not free. So, clients must know the ROI,” said Shetty.
MEASURABLE OUTCOMES
This demand for measurable outcomes marks a shift in tone among Indian company leaders.
EY’s Memani said clients were asking for production-grade AI solutions and they want enterprise systems that are integrated, governed, and secure, and they are asking very clearly about return on investment. “Every CEO is asking about ROI now,” Memani said. “That conversation is happening across the board.”