Saurabh Gupta
President, Research and Advisory Services

Saurabh Gupta is President, Research and Advisory Services at HFS. He sets 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 oversees HFS’ global research function, managing the global team of analysts and operations across the US, Europe, and Asia.

He is a recognized thought leader, and he’s passionate about solving business problems and bringing big ideas to life. With more than two decades 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. He has authored more than 200 research reports; he is a frequent speaker and regularly quoted in industry publications. He is well-known for spotting disruptive technology trends like blockchain, Web3, metaverse, cloud, AI, and automation and predicting their implications for different stakeholders through frameworks like the OneOffice™ and OneEcosystem™.

Before joining HFS, Saurabh led strategy for Genpact’s CFO and transformation services, helped shape the business services strategy for AbbVie, managed Everest Group’s global BPS practice, and worked as a techno-functional consultant at Infosys.

Saurabh is a Mechanical Engineer from Delhi College of Engineering and holds an MBA from IIT Bombay. He lives in Chicago with his wife and daughter. He is a fan of Indian cricket and European soccer.

  • The IT and business services world has entered a crucial phase where the winners and losers will become clear in...Read More

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

    March 16, 2024 | ,

    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

  • Are the Big 4 about to get their lunch eaten by GenAI?

    January 29, 2024 | ,

    Up until November 30th, 2022, the Big 4 consultants dined on the ineptitude of large enterprises to move bad processes into the cloud, while the Indian heritage outsourcers fed on the tasty scraps of supplying armies of low-wage talent at scale to keep these hulking institutions somehow functioning. Nothing has disrupted the cozy status quo of big enterprise technology transformations more than GenAI.  It has been a true leveler across the industry where suddenly everyone is operating on a level playing field, trying to convince the world they have a better GenAI story than their competitors. Our industry has been equalized, and a new set of winners are going to emerge...Read More

  • Not even God can save DXC!

    December 21, 2023 | ,

    DXC Technology's latest play is to bring Raul Fernandez off the bench as the new interim chief and move on from a difficult four years under Mike Salvino, who's passing the torch. But when you look at the challenges facing this firm, you might just come to the conclusion that not even God can turn this one around.Let's not kid ourselves; this isn't your usual passing of the baton – it's more like handing off a ticking time bomb. The company's market value is literally running on fumes and barely a third of its revenue numbers. And that's not just a hiccup – it's a full-blown identity crisis.Read More

  • Services firms are out of runway. They must forget Labor Arbitrage and conform to Technology Arbitrage

    December 10, 2023 | ,

    The fundamental value creation lever in the legacy Labor Arbitrage era has been the centralization of people in a global delivery model. The fundamental value lever in the Technology Arbitrage era is all about architecting and orchestrating the rapidly changing technology ecosystem in line with the client’s business model. It’s past time for the IT and BPO Services industry to jump to a new S-curve driven by Technology Arbitrage if they wish to get back to another season of hockey stick growth.Read More

  • Ray Kurzweil to Keynote the HFS Spring Summit 2024!

    We are thrilled to announce Ray Kurzweil as our first confirmed keynote at the HFS Spring Summit 2024, scheduled to take place from May 8th to May 9th in New York.Read More

  • Industry Cloud must be about value creation, not re-badging IP… Unveiling the HFS Industry Cloud Continuum

    Many hyperscalers and service providers are merely repackaging and rebadging existing IP and marketing it as “Industry Cloud.” However, at HFS we believe Industry Cloud can become the Holy Grail for Cloud-native transformation, but only if the focus is on new business models and value chain disruption.Read More

  • As ChatGPT goes Enterprise, here are Ten GenAI Reality Checks you need to take…

    September 03, 2023 | , ,

    Barely ten months after its birth changed the world of technology, OpenAI unleashes ChatGPT Enterprise, where enterprises now have "Enterprise-grade security and privacy, unlimited higher-speed GPT-4 access, longer context windows for processing longer inputs, advanced data analysis capabilities, customization options, and much more."Assuming the 20 enterprises that road-tested ChatGPT Enterprise experienced these benefits in double-quick time, you have to take a serious look at scaling up GenAI tools or risk getting left behind with the most hyped technology since the Internet came to be... here are 10 reality checkpoints you must considerRead 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