Havas brings Gate One to India as consulting market heats up | Digital

India’s consulting sector is entering a decisive phase. Once seen largely as an offshore service hub for multinationals, the country is now on the radar of global transformation consultancies who are viewing it as a frontline market.

This has allowed tech-focused consulting agencies to command stronger margins, even as traditional advisory segments face pricing pressure. And conventional advertising majors are taking note. 

Yesterday, Havas India launched Gate One, its global business and digital transformation consultancy, signalling that the Indian consulting market is too large, and growing too fast, to ignore.

The move makes India the fourth market for Gate One after the UK, Ireland and the US, with France lined up next. For the holding company, this is also the sixth global agency launch in India, underscoring the country’s rising weight in its worldwide network.

A market ripe for disruption

Ben Tye, Gate One’s managing partner, says the decision to enter India was straightforward. “India is the fifth largest and fast-growing economy. The management consultancy market size in India is currently about $8.3 billion, and set to double to nearly $16 billion by 2030. Clients in India are looking for digital and business transformation capability,” he said.

The numbers back him up. India’s corporates are moving beyond piecemeal digitisation towards wholesale business model rewiring—fuelled by global competition, AI adoption and the need to win younger consumers.

As Indian conglomerates shift their digital investments from mere cost control to large-scale modernisation, a significant allocation is directed at artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and cloud-first systems. Consulting assignments increasingly extend into areas like design-led problem solving, workforce reskilling and frameworks for managing enterprise data, reflecting a move well past conventional IT overhaul.

As companies face pressure to prove value in months, not years, consulting has become about execution as much as strategy. Karan Ingle, Gate One’s client director for India, frames it bluntly. “Clients have started realising that consulting is a lot more than decks and documentation; it has a lot more to do with outcomes. They need fast-paced, entrepreneurial-spirit consulting,” he claimed.

India may still represent a small slice of global consulting revenue, but both Tye and Ingle see headroom. Ingle argues that Indian consulting has lagged its GDP contribution compared to the US and Europe, leaving untapped growth potential.

Karan Ingle, Gate One’s client director for India.

Tye adds that with “12 to 15 global clients with a significant presence in India,” establishing a local team was essential to servicing them effectively. The firm expects that aligning with Havas’ creative and media capabilities can accelerate both Gate One’s and Havas’ growth.

From advisory to delivery

Gate One’s pitch is to marry advisory with hands-on execution, a hybrid model that attempts to set it apart from larger rivals. Its 300 consultants globally embed directly into client teams—an approach that Tye believes enables outcomes rather than just frameworks.

“We provide a combination of advisory and hands-on delivery, by embedding our 300 consultants worldwide with our client teams to deliver the business outcomes that they’re looking for,” he explains. “We typically compete with the Big Four, including Deloitte, EY, KPMG, PwC, as well as Accenture and IBM. We identify business opportunities and challenges, pull together integrated teams and collaborate closely with clients to deliver the desired outcomes.”

This focus on co-delivery is pitched as a counterweight to what many in the industry criticise as consulting’s reliance on long reports that often don’t translate to ground-level change.

The India outpost is headquartered in Bengaluru, a deliberate decision. While legacy clients in Mumbai and Delhi remain crucial, the choice of Bengaluru plays to Gate One’s initial focus on digital-first and globally integrated clients rather than companies still early in transformation journeys.

Ingle also maintains that the city’s maturity makes it fertile ground. “A mature market understands the difference between meaningful change and regular consulting, because they have experienced both. Many MNCs with operations in Bengaluru understand what they need.”

Differentiation in a crowded field

Standing out in a market crowded by Deloitte, Accenture and homegrown players is no small task. Tye argues Gate One’s differentiator is agility.

“We are focused on delivering meaningful change, which could include changing their businesses operating model or organisational structure, helping with skill management through people and culture change, getting the most out of their tech investments, driving innovation and digital technology, data and AI,” he claimed.

Ingle adds that Gate One does not want to be the biggest player, but “the boldest by bringing the global trends, delivery excellence and agility that our market needs today.”

The firm is already working with large retail and pharma companies in India, positioning itself as a partner for C-suites that want consultants to “lead from the forefront.”

From day one, Gate One India will focus on clients already deep into digital transformation, where it can step in to troubleshoot long-running programmes or redesign organisational models. Ingle says the plan is to start small, with two or three capabilities this year, and expand gradually into the full portfolio.

The risk for Gate One, as with any entrant, is whether its boutique positioning can withstand price competition from entrenched global players and growing local consultancies. Its reliance on embedding consultants within clients could prove either a strong differentiator or an expensive overhead in a price-sensitive market.

Building talent differently

Gate One’s Indian debut follows relatively measured expansions into Dublin and New York. Tye says the firm has been careful to avoid “rushing into hiring too many people” or spreading thin across clients. Instead, the strategy is to “build deep relationships, get repeat business, build trusted client relationships.”

He highlights cultural integration as a priority: “We want our local team to feel part of the global Gate One, but also feel like they have the ability and freedom to express themselves in a way that is unique to their own values and their country’s culture.”

Talent is the consulting industry’s perennial bottleneck. Here, Gate One plans to apply its Incubator model—an internal innovation programme where employees can found and lead new ventures from within the firm. Tye describes it as central to Gate One’s entrepreneurial ethos, while Ingle sees it as key to attracting consultants with ambition to move faster than traditional firms allow.

“That’s our strategy where we will hand-pick people from our competitors. In any large organisation, you will always find blue-eyed talent who want to move faster than the company. Along with EQ and our consultants’ empathy with their clients, these are people we want to pull in,” Ingle says.

Unlike agencies, Gate One intends to pay market-consulting rates, not advertising salaries, positioning itself firmly within the consultancy bracket rather than creative agency norms.

Playing inside the Havas Villages

Gate One’s arrival in India does not stand alone; it plugs into the Havas “village” model, where creative, media, and CX agencies co-locate and collaborate. This integration is designed to help Gate One extend its advisory into implementation pipelines.

Rana Barua, group CEO of Havas India, SEA & North Asia at Havas Village Bengaluru last month. Image source: Linkedin.

Tye points to Havas CX, launched in 2020, as a natural partner. “Gate One provides the organisational and operating model design and technical advisory with other agencies such as Havas CX all the way into production and media distribution. Now, Havas can provide a full service set when a client wants to grow with their revenues, or launch a product and service, augment their customer experience or tackle competitors.”

For Havas, the bet is that Gate One will help differentiate its India offer by sitting higher up the funnel—helping CMOs and CEOs rethink operating models, talent retention, and martech integration, areas where traditional creative agencies lack muscle.

Consulting in India is moving from the margins to the centre of corporate decision-making. Gate One’s launch represents both a recognition of that shift and a test of whether a boutique, outcome-led consultancy can carve space alongside global giants.

As Ingle puts it, “India, which was like the world’s back office, today is at the forefront of innovation. And in this position, companies want to know how they can position themselves on the global stage, and that’s where consulting as a practice needs to upscale.”

Whether Gate One can translate that ambition into sustainable business in India will depend on its ability to stay small, nimble, and bold in a market where scale and pricing power have long dictated the winners.

_{Images are for reference only.Images and contents gathered automatic from google or 3rd party sources.All rights on the images and contents are with their legal original owners.}