As AI reshapes consulting, EY is increasingly relying on its India global capability centres (GCCs) to build the engineering backbone for its AI platforms. EY Global Delivery Services (GDS) is a global network of delivery centres located in Poland, Argentina, Mexico, Spain, India and the Philippines. India hosts the largest EY GDS workforce – 60,000+ professionals of the global strength of 75,000 – located in Delhi-NCR, Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, Coimbatore and Kochi. While it started off with back-office support, today, India GDS is evolving into a global AI hub. Many AI, analytics, and platform engineering initiatives are built from these centres.
In recent times, the Big Four – Deloitte, PwC, EY and KPMG – have expanded their AI initiatives through massive investments and proprietary platforms. These efforts focus on agentic AI systems that automate complex tasks in audit, tax, consulting and client services. EY’s $1.4-billion AI push – aimed at transforming the firm into an AI-centric organisation by embedding AI and GenAI into its services, internal operations, and technology platforms – is also anchored in India’s GDS network.
“EY’s $1.4 billion investment in AI is reshaping how we operate and how we help clients accelerate their transformation journeys. At the heart of this ambition, GDS plays a pivotal role in driving innovation globally,” said Raghavendra Rengaswamy, consulting leader, EY GDS. In his opinion, EY GDS has evolved far beyond its origins as an execution-focused delivery arm. Today, it functions as a leadership incubator, shaping global leaders and powering EY’s innovation and technology transformation. “Several of EY’s global leaders are now based out of GDS India, reflecting the strategic importance of GDS. The scale and diversity of work – across assurance, consulting, tax, tech, and strategy helps create multidimensional leaders at GDS,” he said.
India as a Leadership Incubator
Take for instance, the AI Engine Room established in GDS to rapidly design, build and scale AI solutions and AI agents that enhance both internal delivery and client impact. This refers to a specialised, high-velocity team that focuses on in-house large language model (LLM) development, AI-powered tools for audit and AI agents for enterprise data governance. “Our own AI marketplace, EYQ, enables seamless adoption of these solutions across the organisation, enabling secure, enterprise-grade access to the latest AI capabilities. We are also executing one of the largest deployments of Microsoft Copilot within EY, fundamentally improving productivity and the way our people work,” said Rengaswamy. He added that the consulting firm is investing heavily in building an AI-ready workforce through various programmes.
To scale AI innovation and accelerate adoption, EY has launched Build.AI programme that crowdsources ideas and rapidly converts them into AI prototypes. Complementing this is vibe coding using AI-assisted development tools like GitHub Copilot to dramatically improve build speed and quality. The firm is incubating new partner ecosystems like Nvidia and others to jointly build AI assets. “We are building AI not just for our clients, but for EY itself,” Rengaswamy said, adding, “we are leveraging AI to transform how we deliver our services to our clients.”
AI-Native Enterprise
For example, the Transformation Sprint Platform (TSP) for SAP is an AI-powered, digital platform designed to accelerate, standardise, and improve the quality of SAP S/4HANA transformation projects. As part of the broader EY-SAP Alliance, TSP acts as an enabling toolset that helps organisations manage the entire SAP project delivery lifecycle, from planning and design to testing and deployment. Risk.ai provides a unified, intelligent platform for internal audit, SOX, controls, and third-party risk, integrating RiskGPT, ICT automation and domain-specific tools that improve compliance quality and productivity while reducing operational effort. “With AMS.ai, we are enhancing managed services performance, boosting efficiency across our operations,” he added.
EY has made significant investments in agentic frameworks (such as EY Ethan), which enhance overall productivity and the quality of outcomes derived from data and application programmes. These agents, linked to its proprietary and open-source structures, offer customers seamless integration into their ecosystems, eliminating the complexities associated with large programme integrations. This approach not only facilitates programme delivery at a significantly lower cost, but also achieves a higher return on investment over an extended period.
EY’s agentic interventions in requirements generation, development, and testing have resulted in productivity improvements of upto 40% for large programmes worldwide. “Our capability to generate comprehensive knowledge bases using LLMs for legacy code has also proven to be a substantial advantage, yielding up to a 30% improvement in successful migrations to new-age systems,” Rengaswamy added.