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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
Welcome to the last 18 months of labor-intentive services
The defining question for 2026: can services relationships demonstrate Services-as-Software capability and accountability for business results, or are both sides still pretending their effort-based contracts deliver "transformation"? Because those providers and buyers who can't answer that question by mid-2027 will find themselves explaining to boards why their "strategic partnerships" became obsolete. Read More
Say CIAO to the CAIO in 36 months
Only appoint a Chief AI Officer if you're committed to giving them COO/CEO-level authority to kill initiatives, force standards, and drive uncomfortable organizational change, and only if you're prepared for the role to disappear within 36 months as AI embeds into every functional leader's responsibility. Read More
Don’t confuse America’s robotaxi chaos with innovation – China already chose certainty over debate
Big tech leaders are betting you'll jump into AI-fueled robotaxis. However, these represent one of the first genuine examples of AI requiring behavioral change at a societal level. However, the technology isn't yet ready to scale, consumers are hesitant to trust it, and we haven't addressed the deeper question: who's accountable when the algorithm gets it wrong? Read More
Agentic AI without real-time data is useless… IBM now owns the real-time
IBM’s purchase of Confluent is the clearest signal yet that the AI race is no longer about models, it is about data flow. If AI is the engine, Confluent is the gas pump, and IBM just bought the plumbing for real-time, trusted, enterprise-grade data movement, which is the one capability most generative and agentic AI platforms have been lacking. Read More
How a twenty-year-old Is forcing enterprises to rethink automation
David Cushman, Executive Research Leader at HFS Research, speaks with 20-year-old prodigy Brayden Levangie, founder of Levangie Labs about building a “cognitive architecture”... a platform delivering genuinely autonomous agents that can learn, reason, and act in the world. Read More
When your lift-and-shift still stinks: How AI can finally fix the mess you outsourced
Let's be blunt... your outsourcing engagement stinks pretty bad. You’re three years into your five-year deal and you’ve got a low-cost service provider managing your old ways of working, complete with manual approvals, 23-step handoffs, meager 3% annual efficiency improvements, and weekly Excel wars. If your KPI dashboard looks cleaner, that’s only because you’ve spent more on Power BI. But here’s the good news... AI might finally be the disinfectant we’ve been waiting for. Read More
AI will never save bad leadership: Pay your leadership debt to put Humans at the Helm
Leaders are overpromised on technology and underdeveloped on humanity. That gap is what we term "leadership debt" and it’s the most expensive liability no CFO can measure. The leaders who win in the AI era will not be those who master neural networks, but will be those who master themselves. Leadership is not a byproduct of transformation, it is the precondition for it. The AI economy will be led by humans at the helm. Here we discuss the critical six leadership behaviors to succeed in the AI age... Read More
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