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Management consulting firms have realised AI’s potential early on even as tech firms were doubtful about the ways to make money from the nascent technology. Deloitte, one of the top consulting firms, has adopted a two-pronged generative AI strategy: capturing the new wave by helping clients transform, and then, transforming themselves by adopting GenAI. In a conversation with The Hindu, Costi Perricos, Deloitte’s Global GenAI business leader, shared the firm’s approach towards GenAI, the tech’s capitalising potential and the market for such technology in India.
Edited excepts: The Hindu: Despite fears over GenAI’s predictive and analytical capabilities that could impact consulting business, firms like Deloitte have cashed in on this nascent technology. What’s been Deloitte approach? Costi Perricos: Often the expectations from technology are overstated in the short-term but understated in the long-term. This is exactly the case with GenAI.
A famous example for this is the internet. For businesses to drive value from GenAI, it’s not just enough to change the tech architecture. It also needs a change in business architecture, customer engagements, processes, operations and the “ human architecture ” .
But these things change at a slower rate than the technology. So, professional services help companies with accelerating adoption. We have clients who constantly ask us, “There’s a new model coming out every week, how do we get our people to use it?” TH: At what stage of adoption are businesses in and what are the most common obstacles that you see in your clients? Costi: We recently interviewed about 2,700 CXOs for our ‘State of GenAI in Enterprises’ survey, which revealed that they were having trouble moving from proof-of-concepts to scaling.
And there’s a three-fold reason for this: Firstly, data. If you have good data, you get artificial intelligence and if you’ve got bad data, you get artificial incompetence. The second is human architecture.
There are two types of people here, what I call the fearers and the revererers. Our job is to bring people to the middle - give them access to the technology, let them play with it without fear, and understand it. And then the third is risk compliance which includes regulatory risk, commercial risk or reputational risk.
For AI agents, I think we’re probably months to single term years in terms of enterprise-wide adoption. But in some very specific use cases like monitoring networks in IT and data centers, we’re going to see autonomous agents relatively quickly. TH: Are companies making a decent return on their AI investments? Costi: Yes, we’ve found that two-thirds of the respondents in our recent survey, particularly in use cases like IT and cyber said that they were getting a lot of ROI on scaling.
For one-fifth of the participants, the returns were over 30%. Around 74% of the respondents revealed that their most advanced initiative was meeting expectations (43%) or exceeding expectations (31%). Sometimes, the impact is in the more boring areas.
For example, some hyperscalers are using AI to manage the temperatures in data centres and this saves them millions a year because they can manage electricity and gain more efficiency. THB: Which sectors will be affected GenAI? Costi: I look at them as horizontal services rather than sectors. Supply chain, customer service, finance departments, HR functions - these are all where a number of tasks can be automated by AI and will see huge gains .
And then there are industries which are either seeing or will face huge advances, like biotechnology and pharmacology, life sciences and drug discoveries, and even material sciences where AI is pushing research by leaps and bounds. THB: How is Deloitte using AI internally? Costi: We’re practically infusing AI across all our services. We have a General Productivity platform that is accessible by all our employees.
Our system is designed to pick the AI model most optimised for the task at hand. We’re also using AI increasingly in end-to-end software development and package configurations. And I don’t just mean for code generation, GenAI can also help us understand code written in say, COBOL for a bank and translate it into something else.
Once the code is understood, we need to create requirements for it where GenAI can help. Then, we need to test the code using GenAI. And we’re just about starting to use AI agents.
Overall, our goal is to create a culture that doesn’t stigmatise the use of GenAI tools. Employees see execs and fresh hires who are native AI users using them, so that makes them more comfortable with sharing knowledge. If we choose to not integrate GenAI, employees who’re joining might look at us like we’re falling behind.
THB: How has AI changed the role of a consultant? Costi: I think the role will evolve, but I don’t think the importance of consultants will be eradicated or diminished. When spreadsheets first came out, we believed that accountants would lose their jobs but instead now we have more accountants than ever. Humans have proven through history that we’re adaptable.
THB: How will jobs be impacted by AI? Costi: I’m an optimist, because if you look at the history of disruptive technology , human jobs have never gone down. It is more about the ability to transform industries. I’ve spent some time in our innovation centre here, and probably the most interesting use cases I saw were around agriculture.
There’s a lot of work to be done - how we can help them adapt to the technology, how to create end-to-end value in terms of using satellite images for crops. I think farming is a huge industry that can benefit from AI, but I bet if you ask someone which sectors would be uplifted with AI, farming would probably not be the first thing you think of. So, the transformational capabilities are going to outweigh the jobs that will be lost or changed.
THB: Every consulting firm has its own AI strategy. What is Deloitte’s approach? Costi: Because of Deloitte’s long-standing technology heritage, we do everything from soup to nuts, as they say. It could be setting up an AI strategy or helping our clients set up the AI capability and looking at the business to understand how you need to transform.
In some cases, we’re helping clients building the technology and even running it for them. Published - April 09, 2025 04:31 pm IST Copy link Email Facebook Twitter Telegram LinkedIn WhatsApp Reddit Accenture, Nvidia partner to push AI adoption among global enterprises AI infrastructure, the key to global AI supremacy technology (general) / internet / Artificial Intelligence / emerging technologies / science and technology.
