Saurabh Gupta
President, Research and Advisory Services

Saurabh Gupta is President, Research and Advisory Services at HFS. He oversees HFS’ global research function managing the global team of analysts and operations across US, Europe, and Asia-Pac. He works closely with the CEO to set the strategic research focus and agenda for HFS Research, understanding and predicting the needs of the industry and ensuring that HFS maintains its position as the strongest impact thought leader for business operations and services research.

He is a recognized thought leader and passionate problem solver in the global services industry. With 15+ years of experience across client, provider, advisory, and analyst roles, he brings a uniquely realistic and wide-ranging perspective to our industry’s challenges and opportunities. Before joining HFS, Saurabh led strategy for Genpact’s CFO and transformation services, helped shape the Business Process Services (BPS) strategy for AbbVie, managed Everest Group’s global BPS practice, and worked as a techno-functional consultant at Infosys.

Saurabh advises senior executives on business transformation initiatives with a strategic mindset and execution orientation. He has authored over 125 research reports, is a frequent speaker, and is regularly quoted in industry publications. He is well-known for spotting disruptive trends like As-a-Service, Cloud, Analytics, Robotics and predicting their implications for different stakeholders. He brings to the table a combination of subject matter expertise and structured thinking with effective collaboration and communications.

Saurabh is a Mechanical Engineer from Delhi College of Engineering and MBA from IIT Bombay. He lives in Chicago with his wife and daughter. He is a fan of Indian cricket and European soccer but is still trying to comprehend American football.

  • Barely ten months after its birth changed the world of technology, OpenAI unleashes ChatGPT Enterprise, where enterprises now have “Enterprise-grade...Read More

  • GBS (Global Business Services) is dead. Long live GBS (Generative Business Services)

    August 21, 2023 | ,

    For more than two decades, Global Business Services (GBS), the centralized service delivery model leveraging a mix of internal shared services and/or 3rd party outsourcing, has been a tried and tested modus operandi for large enterprises to save costs, drive process discipline and improve compliance.However, with the rapid advent of real generative AI capability, the current GBS model is dated, fails to deliver much (if any) value beyond cost and efficiency and has struggled to create viable career opportunities for ambitious talent.  Let’s face it, GBS is still stuck squarely in the back office and fails to provide a career track for the best and brightest to pivot their firms into the generative AI era.Read More

  • Krithi’s first TCS re-org… One step forward and two steps back?

    August 03, 2023 | ,

    Is the new TCS org structure really going to propel the company forward in the AI-driven era where scarce skills in areas such as GenAI are at a premium and intra-company collaboration and training are more critical than ever?  Does having an all-male leadership team send the right message to clients and employees, where diversity is so important to its culture and enticing the best young talent? Phil Fersht and Saurabh Gupta look into new TCS CEO K Krithivasan's first major re-organization of his TCS tenure.Read More

  • IBM Watson missed the AI revolution, but Watsonx could become the heartbeat of the Generative Enterprise

    May 10, 2023 | ,

    IBM unveiled its multi-model and multi-cloud Watsonx to drive AI-first enterprises - what we are calling "The Generative Enterprise" at HFS. IBM is describing the platform as a "full technology stack" for training, tuning, and deploying AI models, including foundation and large language models while ensuring tight data governance controls. In our view, Watsonx is the first enterprise-grade offering to address the Generative Enterprise holistically.  Here’s our interpretation of WatsonxRead More

  • Supply chain customers embrace agility and resilience — HFS Horizons, Supply Chain Services 2023

    The HFS Horizons report on supply chain services features 18 providers across three Horizons manifesting incremental business value for enterprise clients. Horizon 1 focuses on a linear supply chain driving functional optimization, followed by Horizon 2, which retains the values of Horizon 1 plus drives circular supply chains with end-to-end transformation capabilities, creating unmatched stakeholder experience with a “OneOffice” mindset. At the pinnacle is Horizon 3, which encapsulates all values of previous Horizons plus encompasses a networked and autonomous vision of the supply chain, driving completely new sources of value with a “OneEcosystem” approach.Read More

  • Redefining leadership roles is critical to be an effective Autonomous Enterprise

    A strong governance capability has the talent, tech infrastructure, automation, and AI to deliver the data that will drive success with minimal manual interventions that impede progress and speed. The ultimate goal of an autonomous enterprise allows us humans to remove ourselves from some parts of the system so that we can make continuous improvements to the ecosystem as a whole.What are the leadership roles needed to understand the data they need? How can we build the right internal teams and external partnerships to support an autonomous enterprise? And how can we design smart governance to manage key decisions faster with some degree of confidence? Read More

  • Who’s leading the pack for strategic finance services?

    The HFS Strategic Finance Horizons report analyzes services provider capabilities shaping the financial planning and analysis industry and their proven capabilities to help their enterprise customers access critical financial data at speed. HFS assessed 13 major service providers' prowess in the strategic areas of FP&A. Read More

  • 2023 will provide a huge opportunity for automation service providers… so how do they stack up?

    December 19, 2022 | , ,

    The economic conditions in 2023 will put automation in the hot seat, and expectations are on operations leaders to roll out automation initiatives. So one thing is clear, most organizations will need a lot of help to roll out real automations that perform more than basic RPA - they need to evaluate automation and AI technologies across the board to move their organizations forward across our three Horizons.Read More

  • The HFS Horizons revolution kicks off with Cloud Native Transformation

    At HFS, we have redefined how we evaluate service providers and tech suppliers to reflect the value ambitious enterprises demand in today’s business environment with our new HFS Horizons. Now we're excited to share the first-ever Horizons Report — on Cloud Native Transformation.Cloud Native Horizons aligns the performance of today’s service providers with driving the functional building blocks of technology transformation (Horizon 1), creating the business transformation experiences their clients enjoy (Horizon 2), and the Cloud Native synergies their clients are developing across their ecosystem partners to create new sources of value (Horizon 3).Read More

  • Goodbye Top Ten and Hello HFS Horizons!

    October 03, 2022 | ,

    We are unveiling "HFS Horizons" to align the performance of service providers and tech suppliers with the outcomes they help their clients define, the great experiences their clients enjoy, and the synergies their clients are developing across their ecosystem partners to create new sources of value.Read More