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Category: Buyers’ Sourcing Best Practices
From People to Tech arbitrage: Can we really survive this Great Services Transition?
We are in the S-Curve evolution from People to Technology Arbitrage, that the Generative Enterprise demands. This is truly the Great Services Transition, where the entire financial construct of services relationships is being reinvented to capitalize on the complex new ecosystem of AI platform players, hyperscalers, data integration products, automation tools, LLM builders, and so on. Enterprises must address their debts in these four areas which have likely collected over the last 30+ years: People debt, Process debt, Data debt and Technical debt.Read More
GBS (Global Business Services) is dead. Long live GBS (Generative Business Services)
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
Why actions will eat code
After a remarkable journey through the era of computerization and its remarkable contributions, we stand at a pivotal moment of innovation. It's time to bid farewell to a core element that has been instrumental in its success: We must undertake a comprehensive reevaluation of our enterprise application suites and the ecosystem of coding that has been central to their development and support. Our future is all about visible actions and invisible technology...Read More
We’re entering the Third Phase of AI: Purposeful AI
Welcome to the Purposeful AI where humans set the goals and the boundaries, and your AI is empowered to deliver on the actions. This 'Third Phase of AI' follows from Foundational AI and Generative AI and is designed to make independent decisions – acting with autonomy within human-defined boundaries. Purposeful AI goes beyond a one-time-only assembly of rules of engagement. It will learn from its interactions and from prompts provided by humans to constantly improve its capabilities to action their desired outcomes in real-timeRead More
India’s bloated IT services firms must learn from their startups to avoid GenAI meltdown
Having just spent a lovely week in India leading an HFS special event in Mumbai, followed by speaking at the Nasscom Technology Leadership Forum, I was overwhelmed with concern that so many leaders in India's services industry really have no concept of what is going to hit them. Indian support services could lose a million positions over the next couple of years as LLMs rapidly change how routine IT testing and coding work are delivered.Read More
Are the Big 4 about to get their lunch eaten by GenAI?
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
Only humans can make AI ‘ethical’. Machines make it transparent and accurate
Many tech firms and service providers have done themselves no favors by lumping ethics in the same ‘AI governance’ bucket as accuracy and transparency. In doing so, they have muddied the waters. Ethics, accuracy, transparency, and openness are fundamentally different. Hard-coding ethics into AI could prove an extraordinarily arrogant and risky thing for any human to attempt today. Read More
HFS is intrepid… apparently
Leading marketing strategy firm Antics has positioned HFS Research as "Intrepid" in a recent analysis of the leading tech analyst firms. Read More
Be pragmatic, excited, and responsible: how to get GenAI done
Sandeep Dadlani, Executive VP and Chief Digital and Technology Officer at UnitedHealth Group (UHG), the world’s largest healthcare enterprise with diversified businesses, has a long and deep technology experience across multiple industries on both the supply and demand side. His early days at UHG coincided with the explosion of GenAI on the global stage and has been shaping some of the thinking and doing for him.In speaking with Sandeep, it is clear about the methodical and structured approach he is driving at UHG could define how healthcare leverages the latest technology miracle.Read More
Services firms are out of runway. They must forget Labor Arbitrage and conform to Technology Arbitrage
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
