Phil Fersht is widely recognized as the world’s leading industry analyst focused on the reinvention of business operations due to technological innovations and the globalization of talent.

He identifies change agents enabling organizations to streamline digital operations, access rapid and critical data to base decisions, and exploit the increasingly available global talent base. He coined the term Generative Enterprise™ in 2023 to articulate the pursuit of AI technologies based on large language models (LLMs) and ChatGPT to reap huge business benefits to organizations in terms of continuously generating new ideas, redefining how work gets done, and disrupting business models steeped in decades of antiquated processes and technology.

With more than two decades of experience, he has a global reputation for calling out the big trends, being unafraid to share his honest views, and driving a narrative on the technology and business services industries that shape many leadership decisions. His reputation drove him to establish HFS Research in 2010. It has become a leading industry analyst and advisory firm and is the undisputed leader in IT business services and process technologies research.

In 2012, he authored the first analyst report on robotic process automation (RPA), introducing this topic to the industry. He is widely recognized as the pioneering analyst voice that created and inspired today’s RPA and process AI industry.

Fersht coined the term OneOffice™ in 2016 to describe HFS Research’s vision for future business operations amidst the impact of cloud, automation, AI, and disruptive digital business models. OneOffice is the foundation of the hybrid (virtual-physical) workforce, where automation and AI tools augment the employee’s digital capabilities, and the workplace becomes a plug-and-play, work-from-anywhere scenario. Silos between front, middle, and back offices are collapsed into a single office, where all employees are empowered and motivated by common outcomes and common values. In 2022, he coined the term OneEcosystem™, which extends the principles of OneOffice beyond the walls of the enterprise, and collaboration and connections between organizations across the customer life cycle drive innovation.

Before founding HFS in 2010, Phil held various analyst roles for Gartner (AMR) and IDC and was BPO Marketplace leader for Deloitte Consulting across the United States. Over the past 20 years, Fersht has lived and worked in Europe, North America, and Asia, advising on hundreds of operations strategy, outsourcing, and global business services engagements.

He is also the author and creator of the most widely read and acclaimed blog in the global services industry, Horses for Sources, now entering its fourteenth year of publication. He regularly contributes to key media publications and is frequently a keynote speaker at major industry events, such as NASSCOM, ANDI, ABSL, Sourcing Interests Group, and HFS Research FORA Summits. He has been named Analyst of the Year on three occasions by the Institute of Industry Analyst Relations, which voted on 170 other leading IT industry analysts.

He received a Bachelor of Science, with Honors, in European Business and Technology from Coventry University, UK, and a Diplôme Universitaire de Technologie in Business and Technology from the University of Grenoble, France. He also has a diploma from the Market Research Society in the UK and is an expert in quantitative and qualitative research techniques. He also trains analysts on how to write in a succinct, high-impact style, applying his Five Rules of Writing, which differentiates the HFS analyst voice.