HFS Horizons: Assuring the Generative Enterprise™, 2024

The HFS Horizons: Assuring the Generative Enterprise, 2024 report is for quality assurance and quality engineering leaders, sourcing executives, and service provider strategists evaluating which providers can move beyond functional testing to assure transformation outcomes and emerging generative AI capabilities.

Overview

HFS Horizons: Assuring the Generative Enterprise, 2024 is an assessment of quality assurance (QA) service providers that examines the why, what, how, and so what of their offerings and concludes that leading providers are shifting from functional testing toward quality engineering (QE) and business assurance. The report evaluates 18 service providers and pureplay consultancies on their ability to help enterprises envision and deliver transformation outcomes, including assuring emerging generative AI (GenAI) capabilities across the Generative Enterprise™, a concept developed by HFS Research. It is global in scope and draws on provider briefings, client and partner reference checks, and HFS Pulse demand-side survey data.

Key findings

1. Horizon 3 Market Leaders include Accenture, Capgemini, Cognizant, Infosys, Persistent, TCS, and Wipro. Horizon 2 Enterprise Innovators include Ascendion, EPAM, HCLTech, IBM, and LTIMindtree. Horizon 1 Disruptors include Cigniti, Coforge, Cybage, Hexaware, Mphasis, and Softtek.
2. Accenture drove enterprise-wide transformation across six business units with more than 90% of release testing automated.
3. Cognizant drove a cloud-native transformation program that aligned DevOps with automation and infused AI, delivering a 35% reduction in policy issue cost and a 30% increase in gross written premiums.
4. More than two-thirds of the market remains at a lower maturity level, often still working with a waterfall methodology rather than pivoting to quality engineering.
5. Only 14% of surveyed QA client references use their provider to test GenAI approaches, while 86% do not, underscoring how nascent GenAI assurance remains.

HFS assesses that the QA community delivers strong innovation but does a modest job of articulating the business outcomes those change agents achieve, which keeps many providers boxed in a technology-centric mindset outside Horizon 3. HFS finds that assuring GenAI is still nascent across the industry, with Accenture, Capgemini, and Infosys standing out for well-balanced observations on its implications and emerging use cases.

Research methodology

The findings draw on briefings with 18 QA service providers, reference checks with 37 active clients and 26 active partners, and roughly 600 service provider ratings from HFS Pulse demand-side surveys, conducted globally in 2024.

To read the rest of the research, click the download button below.