India's top consulting and audit firms hit by AI and war; job cuts, hiring freeze loom

Consulting and auditing companies in India are clamping down on hiring or letting people go on the back of the impact of artificial intelligence and a poor pipeline of work from clients because of the domino effect of the West Asia war.Goliaths of the business—Bain & Co., Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey & Co., Accenture and Kearney, along with auditing giants PwC, EY, KPMG and Deloitte—have held meetings on the war and how it would affect the India headcount.“Over the last two weeks, we had meetings with senior partners and the impact of the war on business was discussed. Lateral hiring has stopped for us, unless critical, and we have been told that cost cuts are on the anvil,” said a senior partner in the consulting team of a Big Four firm.“While strategic consultants are not impacted yet, those who worked in the research teams and production services will be impacted.

Many of these teams are based out of India and Eastern Europe and one estimates at least 25% layoffs in these profiles,” said a senior executive in one of the consulting companies.Research teams are tasked with diving into data to analyze market sectors, find out what a client’s rivals are doing, and assess the impact of key regulatory and technological developments, among other things.Production services help in the preparation of presentations such as slide decks and reports, which are often the hallmark of the top-tier consulting firms. Both these roles can largely be done by AI, leading to redundancy.“India’s consulting hiring market is undergoing a structural reset rather than a downturn,” said Monica Agrawal, India chairperson at executive search firm Sheffield Haworth.