Accounting and audit firms such as Deloitte, Earnst and Young (EY), Pricewaterhouse Coopers (PwC) and KPMG have added several other professional services, say management consultancy, corporate finance, legal services and technology services.

Deloitte and EY has almost a lac of employees in India, of which 30000 are in tech practice. Of the 50000 employees of PwC, 27500 are techies. KPMG has a manpower strength of 40000, of which 13,500 are in tech practice. In a sense, these Big Four accounting firms directly compete with the IT services firms.

These accounting firms facilitate the transformation of the organisation. The tech team works on addition of systems. They see the design and maintenance of these systems.

There is an issue of integration. IT staff helps in this integration. The tech staff has specialists from the fields of data science, cloud, application development, automation, AI and DevOps. They provide solutions of SAP, MS, Salesforce, Oracle, Workday and ServiceNow.

KPMG expanded in India as banks were being computerised. The firm took advantage of the demand for cybersecurity. They also focused on customer-facing technology, rather than backend.

These firms also use their experience in product development. They are looking forward to working with future technologies such as metaverse, Web 3.0, 5G, edge computing, quantum computing and generative AI.