Enterprise Advisory Services

We bring together people, ideas, and research to support bold decisions

HFS Research has empowered Fortune 500 companies to navigate complex IT and business landscapes for over a decade. As a leading global research and advisory firm, we deliver bold, research-driven insights and an outsider’s unbiased perspective to help enterprises stay ahead of the curve.

Our approach brings together industry-leading analysts and advisors—who are deeply embedded in your industry’s unique challenges—to collaborate with your team through workshop-driven engagements. We deliver actionable strategies that go beyond surface-level trends, ensuring direct access to our senior experts and bypassing the typical “B-team” experience.

Ready to transform your enterprise and overcome your toughest challenges?
Contact us today to schedule a complimentary consultation.

Our services:

Our strategy workshops can help you drive stakeholder alignment and provide an unbiased, outside-in view of your innovation vision and approach.

Accelerate your strategic transformation initiatives.

Transform strategic vision into measurable results. We help you align business, IT, and operations, achieve ROI on your AI and innovation agenda, and future-proof your technology stack. Our delivery includes:

  • Peer Group Review – rapid-turn, 5-week peer group research across c.5 key questions, supplemented by HFS OneCouncil interviews.
  • Innovation Acceleration Workshop: A hands-on workshop designed to identify and prioritise high-impact innovation opportunities, aligning them with business strategy.
  • Enterprise AI Maturity Assessment: Assess AI/GenAI readiness, benchmark against industry peers, and outline an acceleration roadmap.
  • Strategic Alignment Workshop – A workshop designed to translate business goals into IT and operational priorities, ensuring clear execution paths.
“Enterprises don’t struggle with ambition—they struggle with execution. Strategy isn’t about endless planning cycles; it’s about making bold, informed decisions that create impact. We help organizations cut through complexity, align priorities, and turn ideas into results.” –Dana Daher, Executive Research Leader, HFS

Optimize your service provider relationships and delivery models.

The old sourcing playbook was built for labour arbitrage. HFS rewrites the rules for the AI era—anchoring every engagement on productivity, predictability, personalisation, and performance. Our delivery includes:

  • AI-First Sourcing Maturity Matrix. A practical engagement that scores enterprise readiness to design, negotiate and govern AI-enabled outsourcing deals—exposing where legacy contracts, unclear metrics, and immature practices are leaving value on the table.
  • Vendor Market Assessment. A 6-week advisory engagement mapping suppliers across a defined category, profiling capabilities and commercial terms across target geographies, and delivering a negotiation playbook to unlock structural cost savings.
  • AI-First Deal Labs. HFS’s AI-First Deal Labs help enterprises and providers redesign outsourcing contracts for the AI era—replacing FTE-based legacy models with outcome-driven, consumption-based commercial frameworks.
“The old sourcing playbook was built for labour arbitrage. AI-first deal labs rewrite the rules — anchoring every contract on the 4 Ps: Productivity, Predictability, Personalisation, and Performance. That’s how enterprises buy intelligence, not headcount.” –Saurabh Gupta, President, HFS

Ensuring value delivery and return on your investments.

Chasing lower costs without considering resilience, agility, and outcomes is a race to the bottom. We help enterprises benchmark current performance, design AI-first operating models, and build the governance needed to sustain value. Our delivery includes:

  • AI-First Operating Model Design. A tailored playbook for what AI-first operations look like, combining primary research, enterprise validation, and a practical guide to deliver resilient outcomes across business, IT, and operations.
  • AI-First Benchmarking Diagnostic. A rapid 4-week diagnostic that assesses whether your outsourcing contracts are fit for the AI era—exposing value leakage across rates, workforce mix, and agentic-led commercial models before the next renewal hardens legacy economics.
  • AI Skills Maturity Index. A rapid diagnostic benchmarking enterprise AI skills readiness across roles, functions, and operating models—revealing capability gaps, prioritising investment, and building a defensible roadmap to AI-first workforce maturity.
“Chasing lower costs without considering resilience, agility, and outcomes is a race to the bottom. Operational excellence isn’t just about efficiency—it’s about creating a model that consistently delivers value.” —Ian Maher, Senior Advisor

Staying skilled and relevant in a dynamic market.

Validate your strategy with forward-looking research, implement it with practical advice and on-demand tooling, and network with senior industry peers. Our membership offering includes:

  • HFS Data Intelligence Suite. Four proprietary intelligence products: the AI Compass for deployable AI use cases; GCC Intelligence profiles; Enterprise Mandate Index for buyer sentiment; and HFS HEX price benchmarking. Combined with on-demand advisor queries, this transforms HFS research assets into actionable intelligence.
  • Premium Research Membership. Unlimited access to HFS analysts and advisors and their research, Horizons reports, data dashboards, and expert briefings—giving your team independent, forward-looking intelligence to make faster, smarter decisions.
  • HFS Events. HFS convenes senior enterprise leaders through summits, roundtables, and webcasts—creating exclusive peer networks where executives benchmark, challenge assumptions, and shape thinking with people facing the same problems.
“Traditional advisory peddles process, templates and rate-card theatre. This squeezes unit costs while quietly destroying business value. HFS cuts through all that. Independent, research-backed, data-driven and built for speed, we turn real-world intelligence into commercial outcomes you can defend in the boardroom.” —Nigel Edwards, Executive Leader, Advisory

Experience the difference with HFS

HFS Enterprise Research and Advisory Services bridges research and execution, combining market insights with practical guidance to accelerate enterprise transformation.

  • Research-Led: Leveraging custom research, proprietary data sets, and deep market insights to deliver intelligence that drives confident enterprise decisions.
  • Practitioner-Led: Led by practitioners who’ve done the work, we provide actionable guidance beyond PowerPoint—showing you exactly how to execute.
  • Unvarnished truth: We provide direct, unvarnished truth, cutting through market hyperbole with deep expertise and data-backed conviction to drive confident enterprise decisions.
  • Right-sized engagement: Our flexible delivery approach combines workshops, advisory sessions, industry events, and research access to complement your existing capabilities without the overhead of traditional consulting
  • HFS OneCouncil: OneCouncil is our exclusive braintrust of enterprise leaders and practitioners, validating insights, providing peer perspectives, and co-creating actionable strategies to tackle your biggest challenges.

Looking to tackle your biggest challenges and drive real transformation?

Be the Disruptor

As a trusted analyst partner, we help companies tackle challenges, make bold moves, and bring big ideas to life.

We are living in a world where industry lines are blurring, and new technologies, process innovations, and competitors appear almost daily. In such a highly dynamic, complex, and technology-driven business environment, no single organization, no matter its size or influence, can go it alone. New sources of value can no longer be found just by looking inwards.

To continue to grow and innovate, enterprises need effective collaboration and connection points across an entire ecosystem of

partners. But given the pace of change, creating and maintaining an effective and efficient ecosystem or providing relevant services within one is a significant business challenge.

Our mission is to help our clients—both service providers and the companies that rely on them—tackle challenges, make bold moves, and bring big ideas to life by arming them with accurate, visionary, and thought-provoking insights into issues that impact their business.

The HFS difference

HFS is a leading global research and analyst organization. We specialize in helping businesses manage the complexities of today’s strategic alliance and technology partner ecosystems, both those seeking to create and maintain an effective and efficient ecosystem, and those seeking to provide the most relevant services within one.

We closely watch key industry sectors, market trends, and competitive pressures, and carefully track emerging technologies and delivery model innovations, the companies that provide them, and the impacts they have on the industry. Our analysts and strategists are not just academics; they have deep, real-world experience in the subjects they cover. They’re respected for their no-nonsense insights based on data and personal engagements with industry leaders.

We offer deep industry coverage of:

Banking and Financial Services
Energy and Utilities
Healthcare and Life Sciences
Industrial Manufacturing
Insurance
Life Sciences
Platform-economy Digital Businesses
Retail and Consumer Packaged Goods
Technology, Media, and Communications
Travel, Hospitality, and Logistics

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With the exception of our Horizons reports, most of our research is available for free on our website. Sign up for a free account and start realizing the power of insights now.

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Premium Access

Our premium subscription gives enterprise clients access to our complete library of proprietary research, direct access to our industry analysts, and other benefits.

Contact us at [email protected] for more information on premium access.

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