Rohan Kulkarni, HFS 00:00

And we're seeing that across all of the industries that HFS covers across healthcare, life sciences, banking, insurance, manufacturing, and even telco.

Joel Martin, HFS 00:10

No, I completely agree with you over a couple things that I, through both my research and what I talked about KPIs yesterday. We also inferred that was the role of leadership in a lot of areas. Leaders lead companies, and those companies participate in industries. To me, that means intentional leadership. It has to be in the context of the company or the economies that those companies are participating in. One of the biggest challenges from a telco is that it's always been easy to shed costs and put in technology, but they're pretty lean right now. So as they roll out AI to address the operating systems, business systems, and IT and financial operations, it's less about "I need AI" and more about "I need to change the way I operate." I think the biggest questions for CEOs, with a tenure of five to eight years are: How do I get behind something that I might not be here to finish off? How do I balance the shareholder return that I need to do with that true transition from where I am right now to a future state that includes an AI operating model? I had dinner with Josh Zalen, the CIO of Independent Health, over the challenges he's facing. He pays quite a bit for some of the core applications they need. And he sees "why can't we disrupt this with AI?" The panel discussion with Rahul, the CIO of KBC Bank USA, talked about the very same thing. They get into tactics. The CEO constantly has to pull it back up and ask what this means for the business, how they are changing the KPIs, and where this ties into the actual business objectives? And I think everybody here, whether you're an enterprise buyer or a service provider, owes it to your clients to start helping them understand from an industry perspective on how to lead through this. Do you agree?

Rohan Kulkarni, HFS 02:11

Absolutely. One of the areas of our research that Lisa Stump from Mount Sinai validated yesterday was the way they're thinking about care delivery. Leveraging AI is also beginning to shift. But as they do that, there are challenges in general because of various legislative actions that are beginning to shrink their margins. For health systems, there are opportunities to use AI to expand their revenue stream. Health care sits on a lot of data, and most of that data is actually not being used intelligently. So health systems have a lot of clinical data that they can begin to share in terms of insights. I do believe that that will drive a material revenue stream for them just because of AI.

Joel Martin, HFS 03:04

I think unlocking that data from disparate systems to drive business outcomes will take that heavy amount of collaboration between that CIO and CEO. I mean, we've talked about this since cloud, but I think this is more real than ever before. We're now asking: Where is our data? Why is it in these apps? And why can't we surface it in ways that our frontline employees, our middle managers? The last question from the poll we ran yesterday morning was around the people that are using AI the most in our company right now. So with that, let's start switching in. We have a panel coming up. They're leaving a breakfast for our One Councils. We do have what we call the One Council Breakfast. At every one of these events in New York, we bring together our local enterprise leaders for a couple hours to discuss the challenges and opportunities going on in their companies. So they'll be coming in very shortly. I will look for a cue from Carol when that's going to happen. But until then, we'll start with some opening remarks, maybe involve a couple of you in that. So for those who weren't here yesterday, I'm Joel Martin, the Chief Research Officer.

Rohan Kulkarni, HFS 04:06

And I'm Rohan Kulkarni. I lead the industry research at HFS.

Joel Martin, HFS 04:12

Yeah. Rohan and I joined within weeks of each other back in 2021. So as we saw the company back then, it was like 24 analysts globally. Now we're getting closer to 60. Rohan's been really essential when it came to framing this discussion and driving all the research we're doing in the enterprise context. We're up here to really kind of make that transition today into Day two. First off, we'd like to thank our sponsors. We can't do this without all the great sponsorships. They lend their time. They lend their effort. They bring in some great folks from their companies to talk about what they're seeing in the field and share that very openly, like what Manish Sharma from Accenture did yesterday. But we also have great sponsors like JK, Blackbox, Oak Trust, and Covasant showing where they're emerging and their vision of where technology can go. So please visit and engage with them, I always look to the emerging companies as they're thinking outside the box. So thank you, sponsors. For those that are new, we have Wi-Fi here if you don't have access to it yet. I don't have my badge on because it reflected in your eyeballs. But on the back is the password. The Wi-Fi is Apella and the password is Apella Events, all in lowercase. Please get connected for two reasons. I think the first reason will show up in the next slide: the Event app.

Rohan Kulkarni, HFS 05:48

It is. For those of you who have not yet downloaded the Event app, it's available on both the Apple Store and Google Play. If you've not already downloaded it, you're already missing the opportunity to win some fabulous prizes at the end of the day. Aside from that, this is crucial for all the engagements that you'll be participating through polling and so on. So we really recommend that you download it.

Joel Martin, HFS 06:14

And Rohan will have details about all those prizes at the end of the day. So whatever prizes he's talking about, go find him. The app's also very important because we have interactive sessions like yesterday's Family Feud. We will have polls during sessions. And we do want audience interaction. So get the app now. We're not going to do a poll this morning. We don't have time. We probably will have time, but we're not going to do a poll anyway because we're not set up for it. The next slide talks about a very important thing. We had a lot of posts. I think there were over a hundred posts this afternoon on LinkedIn alone on the hashtag #HFSHowToAI. So please continue to use that hashtag. If anybody says something smart, feel free to quote them or cite them. It won't be me. It might be Rohan. It's always great for us to see all your interactions with us on LinkedIn, X, Bluesky, etc.

Rohan Kulkarni, HFS 07:08

All right. So we just launched the HFS Data Intelligence Suite about a week ago. The core architect of that, my colleague Ashish Chaturvedi, is also here. And we've got some of our other analysts, Hansa and Jason, in room 203 right behind us. So we highly encourage you to take a look at that. This suite holds an enormous amount of data and real intelligence, which would really help with your decision making.

Joel Martin, HFS 07:39

And one of the coolest ones is the 1800 and growing AI developments tracked. We're going to talk a lot about the case studies going on. We're capturing this in a searchable tool. It's out there for you to use. Please tap into it. Because there's no better way to do something right than basically copy what somebody else did that was already right. And then we have the AI-First Deal Lab. Now, I think this is interesting. And Rohan and I were talking about it. You've heard Phil and Saurabh talk a lot about Services-as-Software. That's very much what the market is bringing to the buyer. And defining that is something that Rohan is very passionate about.

Rohan Kulkarni, HFS 08:20

Yeah, you know, we've all heard about Services-as-Software for a better part of two years. We are proud of the fact that we've had it trademarked. But really, what is Services-as-Software, right? You obviously have just about four and a half minutes, so I won't take you through the whole spiel. But at the highest level, a quick 101. It's about IP-led delivery versus people-led. It's about orchestrating outcomes rather than process sourcing. And it's about leveraging telemetry to realize value versus those static contracts that measure KPIs. And part of what we want to do this afternoon, which we encourage you to come and hang out with both Saurabh and Nigel, is to understand how you make this approach a reality. So the HFS AI-First Deal Lab is about trying to build those contracts and make them ready for the age of AI.

Joel Martin, HFS 09:16

The nicest thing about the AI-Deal Lab is that it's not meant to be ideation. There's a 100-day plan about what to do. So there's some real questions we can help you with here: How do we actually get there? What contracts do we start looking at? What's more important? And what are some early milestones? So don't miss the opportunity to interact with Saurabh, who's right over there. I haven't seen Nigel in the room yet. But if you can't make it at lunch, please grab time with them during the day.