Deloitte India Bets on AI to Crack India's MSME Market

Deloitte India is rewriting its positioning to become India’s largest professional service firm by 2028, from an audit, consulting, financial advisory, and tax service provider to crack India’s MSME market.

Deloitte India’s CEO Romal Shetty announced that the company aims to double its workforce to 100,000 and grow revenue to USD 5 billion within four years. He said, “We are moving rapidly towards becoming the undisputed leader in India’s professional services space…We are building the business of tomorrow now.”

The firm said that it currently processes around 40,000 job applications monthly using generative AI. The system now handles CV assessments, technical tests, and preliminary interviews before shortlisted candidates appear for a human interview. In the past six years, the employee count has increased from 13,000 in 2021 to 50,000. Romal Shetty plans to deploy this AI efficiency to crack India’s MSME Market.

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Deloitte India Bets on AI to Serve Millions, Not Thousands

Deloitte is now trying to flip the fundamental logic of how professional service firms operate with AI. Traditionally, one client used to be served by a team of professionals. But this leaves India’s 75 million MSMEs largely unserved.

Romal Shetty has now tried to flip the concept, he said, “Instead of ten people serving one client, could one professional serve ten clients? For that to happen, about 80% of the work must be machine-led and 20% human-led, with professionals validating the output.”

 He said that with this method of operation, a tax opinion that costs a large multinational firm several lakh of rupees could now be delivered to a small business for a lower price of Rs 10,000. In this method, AI performs most of the analysis, and a qualified expert will review the conclusion.

This method becomes the primary logic of E-Vardhan, Deloitte's soon-to-launch digital marketplace for MSMEs, offering GST compliance, reconciliations, inventory optimization, and working capital management through subscription or pay-per-use models. The firm now aims to serve at least one million small businesses through the platform. The firm has plans to partner with Google Cloud, SAP, Oracle, and NVIDIA to reach businesses through industry clusters and associations.

Building Tomorrow's Firm Today

Inside the firm, AI is already reducing manual effort. One internally developed tool is expected to save 60,000 hours in audit bank and debtor confirmations. In transfer pricing, nearly half of all work is now largely touchless.

Shetty's target is to automate 30 percent of manual effort across every service line within two to three years, with 40 to 45 percent of total revenue eventually coming from products, platforms, and technology-enabled autonomous models.

The firm’s homegrown AI platform, GenW.AI, sits at the center of this ambition. Instead of deploying a single AI model, Deloitte combines commercial models, open-source large language models, and smaller specialized models as per the client's needs.

Deloitte India is a leading professional services firm, offering audit services. It’s part of the Big 4 accounting firms across the globe.