Interactive session · 12:50 to 1:30 PM · Thursday, May 14, 2026
All right. Can you hear me? Yeah. This is a clinic, and I realize it's not the right name while you're having lunch to be in a clinic. Okay, but that's improvement for next time, Nigel. So this is going to be an interactive session. While you're having food, I'll ask you to speak as well. And really the goal is how do we structure AI first deals, right? And I think we've been talking about how to AI for the last two days. And one of the things that I've been very frustrated with is, you know, we are still using the 1990s playbook to structure our deals. We're trying to subscribe to Netflix and we're counting DVDs. It just doesn't work. And, you know, as we move into Services-as-Software, as we want to buy more AI stuff, as Ravi was mentioning, if services and platforms are coming together, how can you use the RFP-driven process, you know, the spreadsheets that we were using in the 1990s, early 2000s, to do ITO, BPO, add some bells and whistles, ask the same questions. You know, we've not changed anything. And I think that's the conversation that I want to have here today, because we feel AI first deal structuring requires a completely different way of thinking about how to buy and sell.
Because you look at strategy and planning, right? The whole strategy and planning in the old model, or even the current model, was where will these people be based? Will they be in Bangalore or Budapest or Manila or what have you? How much cost savings will there be? Do I have vendor concentration risk? Should I have a champion challenger model? How many of you have a champion challenger model? Those are the questions that we're still using. But now the business case needs to be built on the four Ps that Phil and I have been talking about. Shouldn't that be how we should be thinking about the business cases? How should we think about, I have at least looked at 10 RFPs from clients just this month or maybe last month or so. Nobody's even asking the question of, in your solutions, what's going to be the AI bias? Nobody's asking the question on IP. Nobody's asking the question of, how do you explain these results? Those questions are just standardized that we're using for the last 20 years, and we continue to use them. How is that going to work?
Evaluation and vendor evaluation and selection is also the same. It's the whole dog and pony show. Isn't that right? We take six to eight months and basically say, come and show me everything. And then you see all these sales and marketing pitches and you say, there's no innovation. So what are we doing? And by the time six months are over, then the market has already changed and there's something new that's out there. You know, I think this needs to be completely changed to more of a data-driven sort of the SLAs need to change. Everything needs to change, right? The contracting and commercials are a big issue right now. We're still asking questions on FTEs, delivery centers, you know, what are your attrition clause? Those are there, but does that really matter in an AI first deal? And we have Mohamed coming in now, so I'm going to ask you all the hard questions, Mohamed. But the contracting and commercials needs to be outputs, AI metrics, governance, you know, all of those things. Onboarding transition needs to change.
I'm not going to go through all of these, but the point that I'm trying to make is everything in the entire sourcing lifecycle that we've been used to for the last 20, 30 years, whether you're buying services or whether you're buying software, fundamentally looks different. And yet, maybe all that I see is maybe there are better colors and better, more macros in those spreadsheets, but we're asking the same questions. And this is not gonna help. So what I'm gonna do is, I'm gonna give you this hypothetical example, which is a mishmash of three of our clients. So it's completely fictional, but inspired by true events. And Nigel and I are gonna roam around and ask you questions of what this client should do in this new world. Is that fair game? Everybody ready to participate in this? Yeah, okay.
So this is, assume there's this large global bank, multinational financial services firm. Three years ago, they signed a five-year application management services contract. Everybody's familiar with application management services? More or less? We can make it up as we go through. And they signed a contract with a leading IT service provider. You can choose whichever IT service provider you hate to be there. It was a good deal, 1800 FTEs at that time. So pretty large, pretty large deal. Complex application landscape, you know, the bank had grown through mergers, acquisitions, and all of that, and was managing across the landscape pretty much all of their apps. And then the relationship has been going all right. It's sort of, nothing is badly wrong, the vendor is performing, more or less. It's not atrocious.
But they've got a new CIO. This bank now has a new CIO. And the CIO is restless. He's saying, look, this was a deal done three years ago, and that transformation is nothing what transformation looks like today. While the vendor has performed, more or less, that is not giving me any transformation. It's an FTE-based deal. Where is AI in this? Where is all the, you know, HFS has been telling me there's 50% productivity and, you know, there's four Ps and all this BS that you guys have been giving me. None of that is there in this contract. You know, so the CIO is really, really itchy around this and the board and the CEO and CIO's boss is asking for, I need faster releases, I need to do this and that and none of that is possible through this AMS contract.
Now the contract has two years left. This contract was a five-year term, signed three years back. Honestly, neither side wants to blow it up. The vendor doesn't want to blow it up. They've not done anything wrong, to be honest. The bank also sees an operational risk if I can't throw this vendor out. Nobody wants to build it up. But both sides are a little anxious. The new CIO is creating the anxiousness, the vendor sort of feels it and wants to figure out what to do here. So the question is, what do you do? Everybody clear with the case study? Yeah? All right.
So here's the first question. And I'll go around and ask people. The first question is very simply, what should the bank do in this situation? You know, because the CIO is restless while the SLAs are green. What's the first move that this bank should make? You know, should it go for a renegotiation? Should it go with just a conversation? The incumbent has two years left. Do they even have any leverage here? What should they do in this situation? What's the first step that the bank should take? And let me see who's... Saju, you've been in this situation, I'm pretty sure. Saju?
Yeah, hi. So my name is Saju. I work for Becton Dickinson. We are in this same situation. You are? And we have been. So it is a real issue because you have laid out the problems well. You don't want to change things too quickly. You build something that's really hard to unearth, and you have to deal with internal issues if you really disrupt the delivery. On the flip side, we also hear there's a lot of pressure from the board. There's a lot of pressure from the street, and we have to show changes. So I think we'll have a couple of options. One of them is to really start setting your expectations right now and being extremely transformative about our requirements. The challenge with that we see is most of the time we go to a service provider and say, be innovative, come up with something, incorporate AI. I think it's incumbent on the enterprise to define what it needs, and that's a gap. So what I would do is really work with external providers, consultants, to create the story for the future and lay it out clearly so that we have the time to develop the future state.
Thanks, Saju. The whole game is to get towards what we do in HFS AI-First Deal Lab, so think of this as a marketing pitch. But anyways, we call what you just described as the North Star. And we always advise our clients to first create what the hell do you want to achieve? Just saying I want AI doesn't really mean anything, right? So what is that North Star that you... Nigel, do you have a guinea pig on that side of the room?
I was looking around. I think maybe Josh. I mean, Josh, you've been on a curve over the last couple of years in a not-for-profit organization with spiraling costs. So there's been a lot of focus on cost takeout. So maybe, Josh, you might want to just give us a view on how you might approach this challenge. Absolutely.
Yeah, thank you for that. We're actually in these conversations, too. This is a really relevant scenario. We only have one year left on our contracts, but we actually started the conversations about a half year ago. We're in the challenger champion model, and that's also, I think, given us some advantage and leverage, and basically our conversations with our partners who are doing quite well is how are they going to ensure that they stay relevant when the next renewal comes up? And by the way, relevance might mean that we do an early renewal so that that way they can guarantee that they retain their position. So we've seen them come out strong. At the same time, we haven't heard great ideas yet. But every month we hear, every month the pace of change is moving so fast that we're getting new ideas constantly. So it's a question of kind of when do we have the serious part of the conversation.
Thanks, Josh. Stephen?
Thank you, Josh.
I actually think that this is a good question, but there's an adjacent question that's more important, which is if every industry is going to get disrupted, are we the one who's going to disrupt our industry? Because if not, we're going to be disrupted, and this is irrelevant.
So what would you do if you were the bank?
If I were the board and the CEO, I would challenge my senior leadership to develop a strategy for disrupting our industry. Because again, if we all believe every industry is going to be disrupted, then we're going to be disrupted unless we're the disruptor.
Fantastic. So Stephen will go to his board and say, it's your job. Yeah. Yeah. Fantastic. Anybody else who has a different perspective?
I mean, most of us are in this situation, and I think we are without naming names. We're kind of in a similar situation, but in a way, this is a test even for the partner. And if the partner, the integrator, is also smart, they're already thinking about it because it's their future as well. So you want to choose a partner who, as Ravi mentioned, is ready to underwrite the current revenue that they're getting in terms of preparing for the future. Believe it or not, some of them are actually doing that, and they are approaching and saying, we understand we still have this number of years left, but we want to work with you to transform your teams in the non-deterministic AI future that is coming our way, and we want to prepare our team. Because the change is not going to be like at the end of two years, you're going to suddenly move from a labor base to an AI labor combination. It requires that ramp up. All of us are going through the journey. So a smart provider would use those two years to walk that journey with you. And so I think what should the bank do? The bank, the CIO should absolutely have that conversation with the provider. Ideally, the provider should have had that conversation with CIO already. That's fantastic.
So ultimately, this is a service provider, right, that we're talking about. I think the CIO needs to look at what outcome and what type of services they're going to need in the next one year or two years, however long the term of the contract is. And then determine, do we need more advanced capabilities or different services to accommodate what we've achieved in our AI journey? So I'm going to go with the consultant answer. It depends, but at the same time, it really, you know, it's like if you're not going to really use AI in a way that changes your service model, then you could start to think proactively about how you're going to restructure it, you know, once it's come to term. But until then, it's kind of, you have to determine how you're going to need it, right?
Nila is being very diplomatic, which is fantastic. Anybody who thinks they should escalate this and have a renegotiation conversation? Or this is just a, let's have a polite, gentlemanly conversation. Anybody thinks we should... Hi, Matt.
I think that there could be grounds for maybe taking a more assertive view on the basis that, like, the two-year windows are really pretty long window based on the pace that we're seeing now. So, I want to try and pull that window forward. I think the other thing as well is if I was engaged in a service provider, understanding that every single one of their customers is also going to be having this conversation. One of the things I'd want to do for my bank is to create some security. So I'd maybe try and flip the renegotiation round into a strengthening of the partnership so that I could have their best and brightest people working on my problem, get that locked in so that the distraction that's going to come from all of their other clients is taken away. So try and move more quickly and strike while the iron's hot.
That's brilliant, Matt. So Matt's going to take a more sort of assertive approach, if not an aggressive approach. Is that fair? Totally. John? John? John, okay. Did you even raise your hand or we just got to?
I did in a low-key way. So, yes, need to be more aggressive. I think it needs to be, if you're the partner, we need to work together and see how we're going to change this so we can get some capabilities even within the scope of the current contract. Because we know the services will now be delivered for less money, assuming the partner is using AI. So how do we share those gains? That would be my approval.
Hi. I was going to say, having been on both sides of this, right, on the vendor side and the service provider side, we're talking about two-year revenue, right? And to be fair, that's house money, right? And it's going to show up, and you don't want to disrupt that. It's about back to your leverage question, the discussion yesterday. Nobody knew this technology landscape in this five-year deal, so it's definitely, I mean, I think you're not doing your corporate duty if you haven't had this meeting, right, because everything has changed. So go re-scope it, you can make it a win-win for both. You're probably going to start to wean off of whatever the current resource allocation was, which includes the talent mix that you had, and then scope whatever you can accomplish. Now, as the buyer, you can negotiate what you can do in two years and what you can do in three years.
Yeah.
Right? However, I think I was quoted last week saying, don't do any contract that has AI in it for more than six months because nobody knows what AI is going to do in six months. And that's the reality of where we are. But you need to have this conversation if you're doing your job, period. Yeah. It needs to be escalated because somebody should come and say, have you had this conversation? I think that's what we all need to be prepared for. Yeah.
Oh, that's good. Let me get a service provider perspective. Akshay, you've been, if you were the bank for a change, what would you do?
So, I mean, definitely two aspects which come over there, right? Two-year contract, the vendor has a visibility with regards to the whole contract value associated over there. But the expectation in most of the AMS engagements sort of is that there is innovation aspect which comes in. So every quarter, you are having some aspect of innovation which needs to be demonstrated as part of your QBR or other perspectives. Definitely a conversation needs to be had as to what as you call it North Star, we call it target operating model that needs to be defined, without which your definition or the customer's definition of innovation AI and the provider's definition does not match. So one is definitely someone architecture board needs to define that target operating model, needs to have the conversation. You don't want to de-risk, I mean, you don't want to risk an existing AMS engagement because that's pretty much running your business. So definitely a gentleman's conversation to have had, definition of what this is, and then look at options because you may have challenges and I would say limitations from the vendor perspective, but having that first conversation basically ensures you don't risk your business, but still get to that perspective, sort of. At least that's my... Yeah, fantastic.
So let's move on in this story. So let me tell you what this bank did. And this is completely made up, but anyways. So this bank decided to go sort of the route that Matt was describing and John, you were describing. They said, enough of the nice talks. Let's have a proper conversation. Two years is a long time. We can't wait for, you know, just the goodwill of these people and our people that something will happen. So what they did was they created like a North Star, Saju, which was not a complicated RFP, 500 page document, just a one pager by going and talking to the CFO, the CIO or whoever were the right stakeholders. And just saying, when you say you need to have AI and AMS, what do you really mean? It's not the solution, but what's your desired state? And so they created that, and they shared it with the service provider, and said, this is what we want to do in this situation. We're not saying we're sort of taking you out. We're not saying we're going and making a competitive bid. This is just for you. But the current contract is not serving our need. We understand there are two more years to happen. But the world has changed from when we signed this thing. This is what our senior most leadership wants to do. Here's an opportunity for you. Do you want to come and have a conversation? But this is a contractual conversation. This is not just a happy-go-lucky sort of a conversation like this. So that's what this bank decided to do.
So now the question is, let's say if they did, I don't know if this was right or wrong choice, you can debate from both sides of our mouth here, but then the question is, so if this is a contractual conversation based on the North Star or based on what our desired state is, what should now this sourcing process look like? Right, is it a traditional negotiation on this will be six to eight months, you know, if you were to do a RFP driven thingy? And it's like come on man like six months out of the two years gone. So why not just then wait for the two years anyways? What's the point of doing this? How do you also align the CIO, CFO, you know, all the different stakeholders because just like in this room there are five different opinions and honestly none of those five are wrong. They're all opinions, right? But how do you align as a leadership within the bank to say this is the approach that we're going to take? And what do you, how do you actually even determine whether this provider who's been doing this was an FTE based contract and been doing the usual stuff can actually deliver on what your expectations are? Because you've not decided to make it a competitive bid, right? So you know where I'm going with this?
So we decided on our strategy. Our strategy is that we want to have a proper conversation, a more, call it an assertive sort of an approach to this problem that we have. Not a sort of completely nuclear option where we're taking it out to the market somewhere before the nuclear option. But now what should be our sourcing approach? Anybody wants to go first? And this side of the room has been quiet. So let me try and get here. Josh has already spoken.
Any volunteers from this side?
Let me ask Rohan. Rohan, man, you've been a CIO, right? You can't just sit there and eat. What's the question? Seriously, this is the, this is how attentive HFS is. But I'll come back to you. Arindam is, Arindam is.
Since nobody has spoken from the other side, I gotta give this side 40, but oh yeah, I think you understand. No, no, no. Go ahead. No, no. I'll take it.
No, I think it's pretty intriguing, the case, right? Because in the first instance, you know, whoever the incumbent who has two years of contract left is pretty relaxed, it seems. You know, they haven't themselves gone to the CIO with a value proposition, so it's automatically a red. So what we are seeing for the second question, at least, is, you know, there is a third-party advisor, consultant, whoever is called in. Oh, really? Absolutely. You know, and you have an IT spend of like $2 to $5 billion and an HFS comes in, looks at all the vendors, not just the incumbent and you're able to give a solution, right? You put in this AI XYZ and this is the value you get out of it and the contract goes red.
So basically call HFS.
And since this, you know, kind of took this fictitious global bank and many of us here know what a global bank looks like. Actually the whole question, the premise of the question saying what are we going to do, the global bank or any global organization and owner through the banks under the bus, they can't figure out who the we is here. Who's the we? Okay, all right. So typically the we could be the procurement is the one who's tracking all of it and if this contract is two years out or three years out, frankly my experience is they don't really care. They don't really care, right? And it's the business which really cares when the business wants to jump in. Some businesses do more than others. Procurement says, oh you can't jump in because now you're kind of cutting the line, right? So it's a very strange situation. I think it's a great opportunity also therefore like the business leader. You said how do I align CIO for business leaders? It is the business leader who's getting the outcome is the single most vested party in the business, in that entire equation.
John?
So just building on what you said, I think you say to the partner, here's our North Star of business capabilities we need within the next two years to meet our growth targets, EBITDA, blah, blah, blah. And you say, look, you partner, build one of these things using your new AI-driven system development lifecycle and show us, build as a proof of concept, just because that shows you can do it and then we can talk. We're not saying that we're going to start procurement. You need to show us what you can do.
That's a fantastic idea. Rohan, let me get you in the spotlight. Rohan leads advisory relations, influencer, all kinds of relations for HCL. If you were the bank, you know, and you were in this situation, what's the sourcing process that you'd...
I think, you know, we've seen many options. People play this out, right? Let me, okay. So it, again, depends upon the bank, what the culture of the bank is. Because again, the responses just dramatically varies by the companies that we have seen. I also run the client advisory board before that, so because of that, I've seen this. The maturity, where they are with the business, if they are in a tough spot, tough decisions get taken. Then, you know, the intent is way, way, way higher. If not, sometimes they just want to actually get this done before they get onto the next set, simply because, as you said, procurement is a big challenge. Why are we doing this when everything else is fine? And it's on the business actually then to push. Without a business push, in this case, it just doesn't move forward.
Fantastic. I'm going to go to Umang.
So, again, this is my opinion. I'm tweeting it. So, if there's no exclusivity with this vendor, and the product services provided, if there's no exclusivity with this vendor, and if the product services provided by this vendor are not, they are not the only ones, I would actually open the race, actually have multiple...
Ooh, you're going nuclear, man.
Because, again, think about this as cloud 2.0. In 1.0, you actually built multi-tenancy for a reason, because whenever any quote-unquote innovation is happening, you don't know who's going to come first, and you don't know who's going to deliver based on new quality standards. And it actually keeps the other person on quote-unquote edge as well. So that's how you can approach this. So you essentially de-risk, and at the same time, pick the best pieces available as this evolves with time.
So you're going to open up the contract and, you know...
And this contract can continue. You can bolt on add-ons between now and when the contract terminates while having someone come in and essentially offer a similar service of sorts.
Justin, you want to...
Thank you. You know, as a service provider, I think the real question is if we're not bringing solutions to the table to begin with, that's a tell unto itself. And I think as the bank has to understand objectively what their opinions and options are. I do believe in the North Star. I think that's ground zero. But I also think that as service providers, they need to be the most intelligent in the room. And if they're not bringing those types of forward-thinking solutions to the table, that's a tell unto itself. And I think that has to be evaluated. Do you want to go?
So I want to stand up for the procurement people in the room since everybody says that we're in the way. A good procurement team should see this as a really unique situation because we talked about it earlier. Service providers say that companies will never let them innovate. Companies always say service providers don't provide any innovation. You've got a two-year window to put your money where your mouth is. So I'd push the service provider even a step further than a proof of concept, because they're running your business now. Show me something you can do with AI that you're doing now, and get that list from your business leaders, because I agree. Those guys are going to drive this conversation. And if they can't provide it, then you've got 18 months left to find a new one.
Yep. Yeah, I think one of the important points which everyone's missing here, we're talking about not destroying the relationship. Okay, so we want to keep that in. Procurement comes into play when we're redrawing the contract. So can we look at solutions within the contract framework where we redraw the work orders? Okay, think about what is the short term, because it's a two-year period left over, what's the immediate term deliverables which we can change? What's the technology we can adopt? And challenge the service provider on that. That's how we could keep that.
Clearly, this side of the room is winning. So whether we change a piece of legally binding MSA, right, and the terms in the MSA or not, something needs to change, right, and something that many of us in this room need to think about. And I think we need to think about a new type of a contractual structure altogether, right? And that structure should entail how the capability provider, the service provider, and the SaaS provider will operate as a single unit to serve the client, right? In genuinely the best interest of the client, right, in the spirit of driving innovation, right, and, you know, breakthrough innovation, right, for the client that they're supporting. The monetary value could still be the same, but the outcome this joint agreement would drive for the client would be, you know, tremendous.
All right, this side of the room.
Fantastic. All right.
Yes, we're back in the game. I'm normally a client, but I'm going to answer this pretending I'm a service provider. Okay, so for the past year, you, client, haven't come up with an AI strategy. So how can you expect that me, using your systems, have implemented some kind of AI efficiencies? We need you, client, to lead that effort, and then we'll utilize your systems to be more efficient. If you're looking for us to lead it, that's more of a BPaaS situation as opposed to BPO.
Yeah. So let me move this along because I have a third, as you can see from the slide, there is space here, so there's going to be a third question. The way that we approach this in a sort of similar situation was a mixture of what you all said, right? Because I think there's a little bit of fault on both sides here. You know, the provider is definitely at fault because like a lot of you said, they've not really come up with anything. They know how the world is changing. They should be the ones and they should be proactively coming to the client and saying, look, man, you should do ABCD. The client is also at a little bit of a fault because they're basically reacting to this new CIO being restless versus, right, they've not really created any strategy or communicated it to the vendor. They're just happy go lucky with whatever is happening. So there is a, if you go into this there could be a good fight on this. I think so, what we advised was we've created this North Star. Let's invite both the client stakeholders.
So the first thing that we advised is use HFS. But after that is let's get both the service provider stakeholders and the client stakeholders in a room for a day or two days. You know, you can spend two days for an 1800 FTE thing. It's not a trivial exercise. And what we said to the provider was, forget what's in the contract for two days. Forget whatever is written in the contract. Forget all the terms and conditions and the service levels and this and that. Just given what you know about the context of this client, because you've been working for it for three years, you probably know it more than the client. Tell us what AI can actually do. What's the art of the possible here? So it's a little bit sort of like what you were saying, John, but not a POC, but tell us what the art of the possible is. But use our data, use all the information that you have. And we also invited the client stakeholders to say, what are the challenges that you're actually facing? Forget the QBR reports, forget all of those things. We're not going to say, you know, provider X did not do ABCD. Let's not look back. But just say what you want to achieve and where things are going.
We also invited procurement to Justin's point and say, you know, let's figure out what if this is the art of the possible, how should we price for this? How should we think of service levels? How should we just, the only thing that we requested was this is, the North Star became almost like the mandate, you know, because it's coming from now. If you don't agree with this, and fight with your CIO and the CFO, right? Because this is the mandate now, so we all need to work towards this. What we told the service provider was, do you want to make it a competitive bid man? You know, is this where you want to go? Or do you want to keep the client? It's not a small deal here. Because there are in the room people who, like Umang, who are going to say go nuclear or go and you know, so that was a big threat to the service provider. And at least in this case, they both agreed, right? And so we had a, so let's say for this thing, the client and the provider had a very successful, I think for the thing that it's in my mind, it ended up being a two-day workshop versus a one-day workshop. One day was really about the client, so we had the client CIO and the CFO coming in and saying, this is what we want our company to be, this is where we want to go. And then the provider really outlining what the solution could be, these are all the investments that we're making, but it wasn't a sales pitch, it was more of, this is what we can do for you.
And then we had breakout rooms of going into, you know, there was this business unit one, business unit two, business unit three, and they were having conversations on what really matters in this, you know, because if you want to move to outcomes, can we actually even define what those outcomes are, right? And those will come from the client a little bit. What are your metrics, right? That's what I need to understand, because if I want to make you successful, my outcome should be tied to what your outcomes are, right? So we had those and it went fairly well. And the second day was more sort of just procurement focused, which was, guys, we listened to all of this. How could you think of, you know, the pricing structure, not the price point, but the pricing structure. How would you think of the service levels? I think the biggest challenge that we had in those two days was everybody kept going back to the contract. It said, this is what has happened. And everybody wanted to go back to the performance and sort of blame game and this and that. That was the facilitation sort of challenge in my mind, but more or less it went pretty well.
The other sticking point was pricing. After this, so let's assume we've gone to this thing, the North Star has been created. We had this wonderful two-day workshop, you know, everybody's playing Kumbaya and gets to this. We've got an 80% solution to this. We've got a decent sense of what the service levels, not service levels, performance should look like and all that. I think pricing was the big sticking point because the contract is built around FTEs and what is the new value of unit that replaces it and there were hundreds of opinions in this. Everyone loved gain sharing, you know, but nobody could actually budget for gain sharing. And nobody was even willing to share 25% of the gains that you would meet on a business outcome with a provider. That's just too much money, frankly. And I think we are out of time on this thing, Nigel, if I'm right.
So we'll park this question, but I think hopefully it gives you a sense of what these AI-First Deal Labs are. Right, and I think the point is, we want to move from this whole sourcing theater that's happening to actual problem solving. Because what we did in a group today was basically, it wasn't like HFS or any of us are doing some rocket science. We're not sending people on Mars. We're only solving for application management services. That shouldn't be that hard, right? It shouldn't be that hard. And so, we brought in research, some of the vendor capabilities, et cetera, that you know HFS has. We made it workshop-driven. We brought the people together. We made it problem-solving focus versus sort of looking at what the contract structure is, et cetera. And we tried to make it future-proof, you know, and there were some sticking points. There will always be some sticking points.
And essentially, this is the process that HFS typically is starting to follow. On this is develop a North Star, and this is a one pager. You know, this is not, if it is five pages, then you've not created a good North Star. Because a North Star should be crisp. It should be, you should be able to get it. It's not the solution. You know, it's the desired end state. Do the relationship assessment. You know, this was, this was a good, decent relationship. There were some issues. Nobody was being proactive, et cetera. But it wasn't, was there a case for this vendor to be fired? Probably not, right? They weren't doing, they were doing their job, right? So there wasn't really a case for being fired. If it was, then you know, this could have taken a different approach. Then we would have gone nuclear most likely, right? But, and then we created this research based case study, or it was almost like a hackathon, right? We said come and give us your best solution. Based on you already know this client for three years, you should be knowing this. Come and get your best AI people etc. Not a POC, not that, but a full blown production solution, what would it look like, right?
And then we did this AI first workshop, right? As I just described, interactive workshop, one to two day, this ended up being two days. And then what happened, I couldn't go through this because of lack of time, but basically, so all of this from one to that AI first workshop, six weeks, Nigel, was about six weeks that we took. There were some sticking points, like pricing structure was a sticking point. You know, there were some other sticking points out there. So that's the co-design and optimize phase. But we got to a LOI, a brand new letter of intent, this in about 10 weeks for this client. And then what we created was a 100-day plan. So, and that 100-day plan was to revisit the contract. You know, we've got a letter of intent. Let's now revisit the contract and restructure it. Because contract is something that can be changed, right? It's in the hands of both parties. Why are we so afraid of changing the contract? You know, and within the 100 days, we can change the contract. The client had to do a lot of work because they were not AI ready. They had to get their data applications, people, structure together. He's giving me that he'll cut my throat. But so the 100-day plan can be used for that. And the provider can start to change things on their end, right? On how do you create from a pyramid structure to a pod structure? You know, how do you bring AI teams into this, et cetera?
So this whole thing, this whole scenario, and it's a little made-up scenario, but it's, as I said, inspired by true events, is possible to get to something close to AI first in eight to ten weeks versus eight to ten months, is what I'm saying, and we sort of more or less came to this solution together. So I'm not saying this is some magic that HFS is trying to do. But I hope this was helpful because I think this is one of the biggest hurdles that we keep facing and I think it's a solvable challenge. Amongst all the hundreds of things that we've discussed in this summit, this is perhaps a solvable challenge. But with that, I will give it to Rohan. Hopefully that was useful.
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