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The AI balloon is bursting and services must be ready to pick up the pieces
Wall Street has drawn a remarkably clear line between winners and losers, with AI-native companies representing the future and traditional IT services firms increasingly seen as part of the past. One side now commands price-to-sales multiples of 60x to 100x, while the other is steadily drifting towards 1x as investors bet that AI will replace the labor-intensive services model that has dominated enterprise technology for the last three decades.The problem with that narrative is that it only works if enterprises can actually deploy AI at scale, and today they simply cannot. Until organizations resolve their technology, data, process, and talent debt, AI will remain trapped in pilots and proofs of concept rather than fundamentally changing how businesses operate, which means the AI balloon won't burst because the models fail, but because enterprise adoption never catches up with the expectations already baked into today's valuations.Net-net, Wall Street will soon feel the agony of this AI balloon bursting if today's smartest services firms are not deployed to prepare Main Street for this AI future our whole economy is gambling on. Folks, services-as-software needs to be valued as the balance between success and failure.Read More
Stop treating enterprise AI like a Silicon Valley startup: Aaron Levie tells you why
We haven’t removed humans from the loop, we’ve just changed where they enter the loop. If you want to understand why most enterprises are still stuck in AI pilot purgatory, you can do a lot worse than listen to Aaron Levie. The Box CEO recently delivered one of the most lucid, unsparing conversations I’ve heard on what agents actually mean for large organizations, and almost none of it matched the breathless narrative coming out of the labs and the VC echo chamber. Read More
Over 27 million jobs are exposed to AI-evaporation across the Global 2000
Twenty-seven million. That is the number of corporate roles across the Global 2000 that HFS Research identifies as meaningfully exposed to AI-driven elimination, displacement, or fundamental redesign over the next three years. Not factory-floor jobs or gig roles, but 27 million white-collar, salaried, benefits-eligible positions held by people who built careers on the assumption that their employer had a plan for the future. Sadly, most employers do not, and the workers carrying the most exposure are the ones least likely to know it. Read More
Anthropic just weaponized the Palantir model. The entire services industry is now in the crosshairs.
Anthropic has announced a $1.5 billion joint venture with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs to launch an AI-native enterprise services company. This is not a services land grab, but a play to own the execution layer before service providers understand what they are about to lose. Read More
How Anthropic is devouring IT services
Accenture has 30,000 Claude-trained practitioners. Deloitte rolled out Claude to 470,000 employees while Cognizant deployed it to 350,000 more. Infosys signed its own major Anthropic deal last week, covering regulated industries. That is over one million practitioners already committed to Claude delivery, while most of their competitors are still reviewing governance frameworks and unsure where to place their agentic bets. Read More
Ever so slightly with Crystal Golightly…
Crystal's mandate at HFS is clear and unapologetically ambitious: expand our reach across the global technology ecosystem, deepen alignment between analyst relations and research strategy, and build the next-generation influencer model that actually drives enterprise decisions, not just impressions. From forging senior relationships across hyperscalers, AI infrastructure players, and enterprise software firms, to launching a new Influencer Impact program and redefining how technology companies engage with analyst firms, Crystal is stepping into a role designed to reshape how HFS shows up in the market. We sat down with Crystal to talk about what’s broken in the analyst industry, how AI changes the influence landscape, and how HFS plans to stay ahead while others scramble to stay relevant... Read More
Forward Deployed Vibes are now a thing. The Vibe Coding Council made it official.
A cohort of Y Combinator startups, operating in quiet coordination with the newly-formed Vibe Coding Council, has declared Forward Deployed Engineering obsolete. The replacement? Forward Deployed Vibes. Read More
Are Global Evaporation Centers next? Your GCC will likely be agentified in 18 months if your board is already questionning its value
We’ve already called out that the next 18 months will witness the dying embers of labour-intensive services. That includes your GCC. If your GCC focuses predominantly on repetitive manual tasks it’s little more than a transaction factory, and it’s the first thing the board will look to automate next. It won’t gradually downsize or pivot, but will likely experience rapid, devastating headcount reductions. Just because the labor costs are lower doesn't negate the fact that these are still costs. Read More
Stop treating FDE as optional: Your AI Flywheel will not spin without it
Who actually wires AI into your live systems, governs it in production, and makes it keep working when the AI software vendors leave the room? The answer is Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE). If your transformation strategy does not have it, you are building an AI theater, not an AI operating model. Read More
The HFS AI Trust Curve: AI isn’t failing… leadership is
The HFS AI Trust Curve rewards an organization that achieves an outcome in which AI can influence decisions. The firms breaking through the curve are not doing so because they have superior algorithms. They are doing so because leadership has resolved the human questions: Who owns the data? Who owns the insight? Who owns the outcome? Until those answers are explicit, AI remains advisory theater. Read More
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