For decades, the large professional services firms sold a relatively simple story: local partners, local accountability, and teams operating close to the client. That story still exists externally, but it increasingly fails to describe how many of these firms actually operate internally. Deloitte reported FY2025 revenue of more than US$70 billion with over 470,000 employees, while PwC, EY, and KPMG all operate at similarly enormous global scale. At that size, the idea that work is primarily delivered within local country practices becomes increasingly difficult to sustain, even if the client experience still suggests otherwise. (Deloitte reports FY2025 revenue, PwC Global Annual Review 2024, EY reports global revenue of US$51.2b for FY2024, KPMG FY2024 global revenue announcement)
What emerged instead is a second, far less visible layer of the industry: Deloitte US-India Offices, EY Global Delivery Services, PwC Acceleration Centers, KPMG Global Services, BDO RISE, BDO EDGE, Grant Thornton Global Delivery Services, and the Forvis Mazars India Delivery Platform. These organizations are not support functions in the traditional sense. They increasingly represent industrial-scale delivery engines embedded directly into how professional services firms execute work globally. (Deloitte US-India Offices, EY Global Delivery Services, PwC Acceleration Centers, KPMG Global Services, BDO RISE, BDO EDGE, Grant Thornton Global Delivery Services, Forvis Mazars India Delivery Platform)
The result is a structural shift that remains surprisingly underdiscussed. Clients still buy a local relationship managed by a partner in Zurich, London, Frankfurt, or New York. But large parts of the underlying work may now be performed in India, Poland, Argentina, Malaysia, or the Philippines. The visible firm remains local. The operating model underneath it increasingly does not. The firms still resemble partnerships externally. In delivery terms, many increasingly behave like globally integrated corporations.
From Cost Lever to Operating Backbone
The original logic behind offshore delivery was straightforward: labor arbitrage. Routine and repeatable work moved to lower-cost locations where firms could scale capacity at significantly lower expense. Academic research largely confirms that this model delivered what it promised. A PCAOB working paper on offshore shared service centers found that the use of offshore delivery models was associated with lower audit hours and lower audit fees while finding no evidence of reduced audit quality on average. (PCAOB – Offshore Shared Services Center Usage by U.S. Big 4 Audit Engagement Teams)
But cost reduction is only the beginning of the story. The firms themselves provide very limited transparency around how much of the efficiency gain is passed on to clients versus retained internally as margin expansion. The continued expansion and investment into these centers strongly suggests that they are no longer simply procurement-style cost-saving mechanisms. They have become economically strategic assets. (PCAOB – Offshore Shared Services Center Usage by U.S. Big 4 Audit Engagement Teams)
Once offshore delivery becomes part of the economic backbone of the firm, incentives change. The center no longer exists merely to support local teams. Delivery increasingly becomes optimized around scalability, standardization, margin, utilization, and throughput. The client may still experience a premium local service model. The economics increasingly depend on a globally distributed production system underneath it.
Ownership: The Centers Sit Close to Power
One of the least visible but most important aspects of the model is ownership and control. These delivery centers are not always neutral infrastructure equally shared across the network. Public disclosures increasingly show that major member firms often play a central role in controlling or shaping these assets. Deloitte USI explicitly describes itself as “a region within the Deloitte US organization.” This matters structurally because it means a significant portion of delivery capacity supporting global work sits within one of the most powerful firms in the network rather than being jointly owned across local partnerships. (Deloitte US-India Offices)
The same pattern increasingly appears elsewhere. PwC publicly references several Acceleration Centers directly linked to PwC US, including Bengaluru, Buenos Aires, and Kuala Lumpur. BDO EDGE describes itself as a joint initiative involving BDO firms from India, the US, the UK, and Germany. Economic Times reporting on KPMG Global Services stated that KPMG’s US and UK firms acquired a 33% stake in KGS from the Indian member firm for approximately US$210 million. (PwC Acceleration Centers, BDO EDGE, Economic Times – KPMG US, UK buy 33% in KGS for $210 million)
These details may look technical, but they are strategically important. Once delivery capacity becomes central to economics, scale, and AI enablement, ownership follows. And once ownership concentrates, influence follows as well. The local partner may still own the client relationship, but the delivery engine increasingly sits elsewhere under different governance structures, incentives, and investment priorities.
The Model Is Spreading Beyond the Big 4
The offshore delivery model is no longer limited to the Big 4. Increasingly, the broader professional services market appears to be moving in the same direction, albeit at different levels of scale and sophistication. Grant Thornton Bharat operates a Global Delivery Services organization supporting the wider network, while Grant Thornton INDUS explicitly supports Grant Thornton LLP in the United States. BDO RISE serves BDO USA and has expanded rapidly to several thousand professionals across India. Forvis Mazars’ India Delivery Platform positions itself as one of the network’s key global delivery hubs. (Grant Thornton Global Delivery Services, Grant Thornton INDUS, BDO RISE, Forvis Mazars India Delivery Platform)
This matters because it changes the interpretation of the trend. The emergence of delivery centers is no longer merely a Big 4 efficiency play. It increasingly looks like a broader structural evolution of the professional services industry itself. Firms competing on global scale, platform economics, and AI capabilities require large-scale centralized operational capacity. Delivery centers are becoming part of the infrastructure layer supporting that shift.
Scale: This Is No Longer Peripheral
The scale of these organizations is often underestimated because they remain largely invisible to clients. Yet the numbers increasingly suggest that they are no longer peripheral support organizations. Reuters estimated that the Big 4 collectively employ between roughly 140,000 and 160,000 people in India-based global capability centers alone. EY previously disclosed that Global Delivery Services employed almost 70,000 professionals. BDO RISE publicly references more than 2,400 employees across five locations in India. (Reuters – Big Four expand India operations amid GCC growth, EY GDS careers information, BDO RISE)
Once delivery organizations reach this scale, they stop functioning as appendices to the firm. They become part of the operational core. Scale changes more than cost. It changes where knowledge accumulates, where processes mature, where AI models are trained, and where operational leverage sits. Over time, organizations of this size develop their own institutional gravity.
The visible firm may still sit locally. Increasingly, the operational center of gravity does not.
Capital Intensity: The Partnership Model Starts Behaving Like a Platform Business
Traditional professional services firms historically required relatively limited centralized capital. The classic partnership model scaled primarily through people, local offices, and partner relationships. Delivery capacity sat largely within local firms, and much of the investment burden remained decentralized.
Global delivery centers begin to change that equation materially. Large-scale delivery organizations require significant investment into real estate, cybersecurity, workflow platforms, AI tooling, standardized delivery processes, data infrastructure, operational management layers, and increasingly automation capabilities. The larger these centers become, the more the economics of the firm start resembling platform economics rather than traditional partnership economics.
This creates structural tension inside the traditional member-firm model. The firms benefiting most from centralized investment are not always the firms carrying the investment burden. A local partnership focused on annual partner distributions may rationally underinvest in infrastructure whose long-term benefits accrue unevenly across the network. The result is increasing pressure toward centralized control, centralized investment, and new governance mechanisms capable of funding industrial-scale platforms.
This is one reason private equity and external capital are becoming strategically relevant to the industry. Once firms require larger pools of long-term capital to fund AI, delivery infrastructure, and global platforms, the classic partnership model starts encountering structural financing constraints. The industry increasingly requires corporate-style investment while still operating within partnership-style governance structures.
The Pyramid Changes Shape
The traditional professional services pyramid depended on a very specific economic and organizational logic. Large numbers of junior staff performed execution work, managers coordinated and reviewed it, and partners sat at the top controlling client relationships and judgment. The model was labor-intensive, apprenticeship-driven, and locally integrated.
Global delivery centers already started weakening that structure long before AI arrived. Work historically performed by junior professionals inside local offices increasingly moved into centralized delivery organizations. The execution layer began separating from the relationship layer. (PCAOB – Offshore Shared Services Center Usage by U.S. Big 4 Audit Engagement Teams)
AI now accelerates the same structural trend. Many of the repetitive tasks moved into delivery centers are precisely the tasks increasingly targeted by automation. This creates simultaneous pressure on both the local junior workforce and parts of the offshore execution workforce. (Financial Times – Top consultancies freeze starting salaries as AI threatens ‘pyramid’ model, Business Insider – EY’s new AI agents will be a steep learning curve for junior audit staff)
The result is that the traditional pyramid increasingly starts resembling an hourglass. A thinner junior layer feeds into highly centralized operational, technological, and AI-enabled delivery capabilities sitting in the middle of the organization, while senior relationship management and industry expertise remain concentrated at the top. The middle increasingly becomes industrialized rather than apprenticeship-based.
This changes more than staffing ratios. It changes promotion paths, economics, knowledge accumulation, and eventually partnership itself.
The Emergence of the Two-Speed Firm
Global delivery centers also create a second structural divide inside professional services firms: not all parts of the organization evolve at the same speed.
The centralized delivery layer increasingly operates according to platform economics. It favors scale, standardization, process discipline, workflow integration, AI enablement, centralized investment, and operational efficiency. These organizations increasingly behave like globally integrated production systems rather than traditional local partnerships.
Meanwhile, large parts of the traditional partnership layer still operate according to local economics. Incentives remain tied to local profitability, partner autonomy, utilization targets, annual distributions, and relationship ownership.
The result is the emergence of what increasingly looks like a two-speed firm. (Cf. The Two-Speed Firm: Why Professional Services Firms Are Quietly Splitting Into Different Economic Systems Under One Brand)
One layer of the organization behaves increasingly like a centralized platform business built around globally integrated delivery, operational coordination, and scalable infrastructure. Another layer still behaves like a federation of relatively autonomous partnerships optimized around local relationships and local economics.
The tension between those two systems increasingly sits at the center of many transformation struggles inside professional services firms.
This matters because platform economics reward coordination, concentration, and scale. The larger and more integrated the delivery infrastructure becomes, the stronger the economic advantages of standardization, centralized workflows, shared platforms, and concentrated operational data become as well. AI further accelerates these dynamics because AI systems benefit disproportionately from standardized processes, integrated workflows, and large-scale operational environments.
The firms therefore increasingly face a structural governance challenge. They require corporate-style coordination, platform investment, and industrialized operating models while still functioning inside partnership-style governance structures built around local autonomy and distributed economics.
Many of the transformation tensions now emerging across the industry increasingly sit between these two operating logics rather than within either system individually. (Cf. The Professional Services AI Paradox; cf. The Next Decade: Twelve Predictions for the Big 10 in Professional Services)
Knowledge Moves With the Work
When work moves, knowledge follows. Delivery centers do not simply execute predefined tasks indefinitely. Over time, repetition creates expertise, process maturity, operational know-how, and institutional memory.
Historically, the professional services pyramid relied heavily on apprenticeship. Junior staff learned through execution, managers learned through review, and partners accumulated judgment over decades of layered exposure. Distributed delivery models alter that dynamic materially.
The movement of work into centralized delivery environments also changes where institutional knowledge accumulates. Over time, process expertise, operational know-how, workflow optimization, automation knowledge, and increasingly AI training data concentrate inside centralized delivery organizations rather than local engagement teams. This gradually shifts operational gravity away from local partnerships toward centralized systems and delivery platforms. The client relationship may still sit locally. Increasingly, parts of the firm’s practical execution intelligence do not. (PCAOB – Offshore Shared Services Center Usage by U.S. Big 4 Audit Engagement Teams)
Research published through the American Accounting Association highlights coordination, supervision, and communication challenges that arise when audit work becomes geographically fragmented. These challenges do not mean the model is structurally broken. But they do show that distributed delivery requires different forms of coordination, control, review, and knowledge transfer than the traditional local-office pyramid. (American Accounting Association – Coordination and Communication Challenges in Global Group Audits)
This does not necessarily mean the model fails. But it does mean the traditional pyramid changes structurally. Offshore teams deepen technical expertise while remaining further removed from direct client context. Local teams remain close to the client but may accumulate less hands-on execution experience over time. The knowledge base no longer sits neatly inside one integrated hierarchy. It becomes fragmented across locations, systems, and organizational layers. (SSRN – Offshore Shared Services Center Usage by U.S. Big 4 Audit Engagement Teams)
Quality: Stable on Average, Fragile in Structure
The evidence on quality is more nuanced than either critics or firms often suggest publicly. The available research does not support simplistic claims that offshore delivery automatically reduces quality. The PCAOB working paper found no evidence of reduced audit quality on average. (PCAOB – Offshore Shared Services Center Usage by U.S. Big 4 Audit Engagement Teams)
At the same time, academic studies also point toward structural fragility inside distributed delivery models. Research published through the American Accounting Association has examined how shared service centers affect perceptions of audit quality, while other research on globalized audit engagements highlights coordination and communication challenges across distributed teams. (American Accounting Association – The Use of Shared Service Centers in the Audit Industry and the Impact on Financial Analyst Perceptions, American Accounting Association – Coordination and Communication Challenges in Global Group Audits)
This distinction matters. The model may be statistically stable while remaining structurally fragile. Quality increasingly depends less on individual excellence and more on how effectively the distributed system itself is orchestrated. The more fragmented the operating model becomes, the more important governance, process discipline, knowledge transfer, and communication quality become.
The Illusion of Local Delivery
Despite these structural changes, the external narrative has barely shifted. Clients still interact primarily with local teams and local partners. The distributed operating model largely remains behind the curtain. Research on client management’s assessments of audit offshoring suggests that clients may evaluate offshore delivery differently when they understand how work is distributed and what trade-offs may be involved. (SSRN – Client Management’s Assessments of Audit Offshoring and Their Willingness to Trade Off Audit Quality)
Regulatory disclosure does relatively little to change this perception. PCAOB Form AP requires disclosure of certain audit participants, including other accounting firms participating in the audit, but it does not make offshore delivery particularly transparent or visible to most clients in practice. (PCAOB – Form AP: Auditor Reporting of Certain Audit Participants)
The result is not outright misrepresentation. But it increasingly creates an illusion of locality. Clients buy a local firm and experience a local relationship. Underneath, the production model is increasingly globalized, distributed, and industrialized. As long as the system works, this distinction may remain manageable. But as complexity, AI integration, cyber risk, data governance, and operational concentration continue to increase, the distinction becomes strategically more important.
Offshore Delivery and AI Are Starting to Converge
The traditional professional services pyramid is now being pressured from two directions simultaneously. Offshore delivery already moved large portions of execution into centralized delivery organizations. AI is increasingly targeting many of those same activities. Financial Times reporting suggests that firms are already rethinking hiring structures and the traditional pyramid model as AI automates repetitive work. Business Insider reported that EY is deploying AI agents across audit and assurance workflows, creating a steep learning curve for junior audit staff. (Financial Times – Top consultancies freeze starting salaries as AI threatens ‘pyramid’ model, Business Insider – EY’s new AI agents will be a steep learning curve for junior audit staff)
This creates a structural shift that goes far beyond simple efficiency gains. Offshore delivery reduced local execution capacity. AI increasingly reduces the need for execution altogether. Together, they compress the base of the pyramid while increasing reliance on centralized systems, platforms, and delivery infrastructure.
The industry increasingly starts to resemble an hourglass rather than a pyramid: a thinner junior layer, highly centralized operational and AI capabilities in the middle, and senior relationship management at the top. The implications for talent development, partner economics, knowledge accumulation, governance, and organizational control are still unfolding.
Closing Thoughts
Global delivery centers solved a real problem. They allowed professional services firms to scale globally, manage cost pressure, access talent pools, standardize delivery, and build increasingly industrialized operating models. But in solving those problems, they also changed the nature of the firm itself.
Delivery is increasingly centralized. Knowledge is increasingly distributed. Operational leverage increasingly sits inside globally scaled systems rather than purely inside local partnerships. And ownership of critical delivery infrastructure increasingly concentrates around the most powerful firms and entities inside the network.
The model works. That is precisely why it keeps expanding. But it also creates new tensions. Local firms sell work they may not fully control operationally. Knowledge accumulates where execution happens rather than where relationships sit. Margins improve while transparency around the underlying economics remains relatively limited. The firms become simultaneously more scalable and more opaque.
Professional services firms have not abandoned the partnership model. But many increasingly operate a global production system underneath it. The longer that system grows, the harder it becomes to maintain the idea that the visible local firm is still the full operating reality behind the brand. (Cf. The Two-Speed Firm: Why Professional Services Firms Are Quietly Splitting Into Different Economic Systems Under One Brand)
What This Means for Boards
Boards should ask a relatively simple but increasingly important question: where is the work actually being done, and who controls the capabilities delivering it.
This is not merely a staffing question. It is an operating-model question. It affects economics, resilience, cyber risk, data governance, knowledge retention, AI enablement, and strategic control.
Boards should also examine the economics more carefully. Delivery centers clearly lower cost, but the allocation of those gains between clients, local firms, global entities, and major member firms often remains opaque. Understanding those incentive structures matters increasingly when evaluating long-term value and operational dependency.
Finally, boards should view offshore delivery and AI as connected developments rather than separate trends. Together, they are reshaping the talent model, the knowledge model, and the economics of professional services firms themselves. The firms that manage this transition deliberately may strengthen their position significantly. The firms that do not may eventually discover that the operating model underneath the partnership became structurally different long before governance fully caught up.
I work with boards and executive teams on independent perspectives related to professional-services transformation, governance, operating models, platform economics, and the changing economics of professional-services firms.
If your leadership team is working through similar questions around ownership structures, governance alignment, investment pressure, or operating-model evolution, you may find my Future of Professional Services board sessions and Economic Reality Review valuable. Feel free to reach out.
Sources
Primary Sources
- Deloitte reports FY2025 revenue
- PwC Global Annual Review 2024
- EY reports global revenue of US$51.2b for FY2024
- KPMG FY2024 global revenue announcement
- Deloitte US-India Offices
- EY Global Delivery Services
- PwC Acceleration Centers
- KPMG Global Services
- BDO RISE
- BDO EDGE
- Grant Thornton Global Delivery Services
- Grant Thornton INDUS
- Forvis Mazars India Delivery Platform
- PCAOB – Offshore Shared Services Center Usage by U.S. Big 4 Audit Engagement Teams
- PCAOB – Form AP: Auditor Reporting of Certain Audit Participants
Secondary Sources
- Reuters – Big Four expand India operations amid GCC growth
- Economic Times – KPMG US, UK buy 33% in KGS for $210 million
- Financial Times – Top consultancies freeze starting salaries as AI threatens ‘pyramid’ model
- Business Insider – EY’s new AI agents will be a steep learning curve for junior audit staff
- American Accounting Association – Coordination and Communication Challenges in Global Group Audits
- American Accounting Association – The Use of Shared Service Centers in the Audit Industry and the Impact on Financial Analyst Perceptions
- SSRN – Offshore Shared Services Center Usage by U.S. Big 4 Audit Engagement Teams
- SSRN – Client Management’s Assessments of Audit Offshoring and Their Willingness to Trade Off Audit Quality