Our India hub is more than just an offshore centre: In conversation with SC&H’s Hardeep Chadha and Anish Suri

For decades, consulting firms looked at India largely as a scale engine. Teams were built to support global operations, optimise costs, and execute specialised workloads from offshore centres.

But, now that equation is gradually changing.

As AI begins reshaping finance, audit, tax, and enterprise advisory functions, firms are increasingly looking at India not merely as a talent destination, but as a strategic base for analytical consulting, intelligent automation, and product-led innovation. And, it is this transition that SC&H Group is betting on with its first international office in Gurgaon.

“We are here not with the fact of cost optimisation. We are here and investing on the brains,” says Hardeep Chadha, Senior Vice President – Accounting and Audit Consulting, SC&H.

The India centre, which formally began operations just this year in January, marks a significant moment in the 36-year-old consulting firm’s global expansion journey. For nearly two years, the top executive shares, the leadership team internally debated international growth opportunities, evaluating regions including the Philippines and parts of South America before ultimately choosing India.

But for them the decision came down to one factor above all else, talent.

“We thought this is the market where we can have a pool of talent and the skill set,” says Chadha.

But the larger ambition extends far beyond building another offshore delivery centre.

“This is the first international office,” says Anish Suri, Senior Vice President – Tax and Corporate Finance, SC&H. “But the thought is to make this really big across all service lines.”

Reimagining the Consulting GCC

That ambition reflects a broader transformation taking place across the consulting and GCC ecosystem. Increasingly, global firms are moving away from transactional offshore models and toward integrated centres capable of driving analytics, advisory, automation, and product innovation.

SC&H’s India operations currently support US tax, audit, and technical advisory functions, but the roadmap, as shared by the top executives, already includes finance transformation, mergers and acquisitions, enterprise consulting, capital reporting, and AI-led product development.

The Gurgaon office operates as an extension of the firm’s US business rather than an independent India-focused entity. The top executives also share that the company currently has no plans to enter the Indian consulting market directly. Instead, the India team works alongside US counterparts to support existing global clients.

“We are the extended team of the US team where we both jointly work together for the requirement of the client,” explains Chadha.

The choice of Gurgaon itself was strategic. According to the leadership, the company evaluated multiple factors including educational ecosystems, cultural alignment, and long-term talent availability before finalising the location.

“You have to be technically ten out of ten,” says Suri. “But beyond that, we also looked at cultural integration and mindset.”

Building a hire-to-retire culture

That mindset has become increasingly important at a time when consulting firms across India are competing aggressively for specialised finance, tax, and AI talent. Yet SC&H’s leadership believes long-term culture matters as much as technical capability.

The company repeatedly referred to what it describes as a “hire to retire” philosophy, a model deeply rooted within its US operations. The employee-owned firm positions itself as a long-term career destination rather than a short-term stepping stone.

“People joined the organisation at staff level and became leaders over time,” says Suri. “We want to build the same thing here.”

That philosophy also shapes how the company views talent development. Unlike many GCC environments where employees often remain restricted to a narrow operational role, SC&H says it wants professionals to understand broader business ecosystems and end-to-end consulting processes.

“We don’t want people only doing one small piece for years,” says Chadha. “We want them to understand the entire ecosystem.”

The leadership believes the company’s branding and organisational culture have already helped attract strong talent in the market. Suri believes many candidates are drawn to the company after understanding its employee-owned structure and long-term growth philosophy.

“The young generation is very smart nowadays,” he says. “When they understand the culture and the growth opportunities, they connect with it.”

The AI-first consulting vision

The next major phase of SC&H’s India journey is expected to revolve around AI. The company plans to establish an AI lab within the India centre focused on developing products and analytical tools that can support global consulting and finance operations. While still in the planning phase, the initiative is central to the firm’s long-term strategy.

“The products that we are planning and thinking of building should outrightly support the clients,” says Suri.

He describes a future where finance and tax professionals spend less time on repetitive preparation work and more time on analysis, decision-making, and strategic advisory.

“If you upload the initial trial balance and compare it with last quarter or last year, those comparative insights should automatically be available,” he explains. “Then professionals can spend more time on analytics rather than preparation.”

The vision reflects a larger shift underway across enterprise finance and consulting. Over the last decade, automation steadily reduced manual intervention across operational workflows. AI, however, is now pushing organisations toward intelligent systems capable of interpretation, contextual analysis, and predictive insights.

“The evolution has been from human effort to process structuring and then to automation,” says Suri. “Now the focus is how much of the process can intelligently flow on its own.”

Yet both executives remain careful about framing AI as a replacement for human expertise.

“AI is actually supporting or helping us to serve clients in a better manner,” says Chadha. “Ultimately, human brains have to approve it.”

Suri recalled a client engagement involving years of inconsistent financial and commission data spread across changing contracts and systems. According to him, manually analysing and correcting that level of complexity would have been nearly impossible.

“What technology helped us do was identify comparative trends, analyse patterns, and pinpoint the issues,” he says. “Then human analysis and judgement came in to fix it.”

Scaling the next phase

For SC&H, beginning operations in 2026 also provides a strategic advantage. Unlike older organisations now attempting to retrofit AI into legacy systems, the firm has the opportunity to build AI-first processes from the ground up in India. But still, building a global consulting hub from scratch comes with its own challenges.

According to Chadha, the three biggest hurdles during the initial stages are identifying the right location, setting up IT infrastructure, and finding specialised talent.

“These are the initial phase challenges,” he shares. “But gradually they get streamlined.”

Hiring plans now span multiple experience levels, from young professionals to senior advisory leaders. The organisation says the underlying expectation remains consistent across every role which is a strong technical expertise combined with long-term cultural alignment.

Three months into operations, the Gurgaon office remains relatively small, but the conversations inside the company already sound significantly larger than a traditional offshore expansion story.

For SC&H, as implied by the top executives, India is not merely being positioned as a delivery centre, rather it is being envisioned as a future hub for analytical consulting, AI-led finance transformation, and globally integrated enterprise operations.

And as consulting firms rethink what global capability truly means in an AI-driven era, that distinction may ultimately define the next phase of international expansion itself.