As AI Reshapes Consulting, Deloitte is Betting on SAP's Enterprise AI Future

Deloitte has spent decades telling companies what technology to buy and how to use it.

Earlier this month, it opened a delivery centre in Bengaluru dedicated entirely to the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) giant SAP, not to implement SAP software for clients, which consulting firms have done for decades, but to go deeper.

Deloitte wants to work closely with SAP on its AI transformation, testing new capabilities before broader deployment and building the expertise needed to implement them at scale.

The centre, which became operational this month, brings together more than 1,000 professionals across AI, cloud, automation, and data engineering, with plans to add 300–500 AI specialists over the next one to two years. 

Why SAP, and Why Now

What makes it different from Deloitte's existing SAP delivery operations is the nature of the relationship. 

"We don't have a dedicated centre working together with SAP globally," Sandeep Poojary, Partner at Deloitte and the firm's Global Delivery Head for large-scale SAP implementations and generative AI initiatives, tells AIM. "We have centres where we work for our customers who are adopting SAP as a technology. What we are doing in this delivery centre is working together with SAP on a co-development, co-partnership, co-transformation journey."

The centre will serve SAP and joint Deloitte-SAP customers across implementation, architecture, engineering, and managed services. But its strategic centrepiece is what Poojary calls the "customer zero" role, in which Deloitte is among the first partners to test and refine SAP's new AI capabilities before they are released to the wider market.

"Whatever latest and new releases come out in the market, we as the ‘customer zero’ with SAP make sure that we try it out, we adapt it, we fine-tune it, and then we package it into SAP's ERP applications, together with SAP, and release it to the market," Poojary says.

SAP sits at the core of enterprise operations across manufacturing, logistics, finance, and the public sector, and it is in the middle of a significant push to embed AI across its product suite.

"Our job is to marry both together—the agentic AI that exists in the market and how we combine that into business AI adoption at the enterprise level," Poojary notes. "Whatever agentic AI boom you are seeing in the market has to be finally put into enterprise applications. That is what we do together with SAP."

The Broader Shift

The Bengaluru centre is also a response to a structural challenge facing the entire consulting industry. AI is compressing the value of the kind of work, like analysis, documentation, compliance, and first-draft delivery, that junior consultants have historically done and that large consulting firms have historically billed by the hour.

"We are just seeing a massive skill change from what people do now to what they will be doing in future," Poojary says. "I don't say we are reducing the skill force, but we are taking more and more work from companies so that the time taken is now fast-tracked."

In response, Deloitte's leadership has decided to move up the value chain. 

"As our CEO spoke recently, we are changing from consulting to tech consulting," Poojary says. "30–40% of revenue will be part of tech consulting. We are going into a product-driven approach and an AI-driven tech consulting approach as the industry is shaping up."

Across the Big Four, firms are investing heavily in new AI capabilities, though the approaches differ. PwC, EY and KPMG have focused on building proprietary AI platforms and agent frameworks, while Deloitte's Bengaluru centre is betting on building deep expertise in embedding AI into enterprise software ecosystems such as SAP. 

Deloitte has committed $3 billion to scale generative AI and agentic systems through 2030.

It launched a unified agentic intelligence network embedded into its Omnia audit platform to automate complex workflows and enhance risk analysis. Its Zora AI tool is designed to help organisations improve operational efficiency. In 2022, it launched Deloitte AI Institute in India to develop localised AI solutions after collaborating with academia, startups, and research groups.