Meet the 2026 Services-as-Software™ Award Winners

Recognizing the companies redefining how enterprise work gets done through AI, software, and services.

The inaugural HFS Research Services-as-Software™ Awards recognize the companies turning the convergence of services, software, AI, and automation into new ways of delivering enterprise work and outcomes.

From established global providers reinventing how work gets delivered to emerging firms building entirely new AI-native models, the 2026 winners represent Services-as-Software in action.

Awards at a glance

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About the HFS Services-as-Software Awards

The HFS Services-as-Software Awards recognize organizations leading the shift from traditional people-heavy services and standalone software toward technology-enabled models that combine AI, automation, software, and human expertise to deliver enterprise outcomes.

The awards are grounded in the HFS Services-as-Software vision: as AI changes the economics of enterprise technology and services, the distinction between buying software and buying services is increasingly disappearing. Services are becoming more software-like, software is increasingly performing work once delivered by people, and a new generation of companies is emerging around that convergence.

The inaugural 2026 awards were created to recognize the organizations already turning this shift into reality.

Meet the 2026 award winners

After evaluation and judging by HFS Research and its Advisory Board, the following organizations earned top honors across four award categories.

Best Services-as-Software Transformation

First Place — Ema

Ema’s AI Employee absorbs end-to-end tasks rather than isolated steps. At Wipro, 3M+ queries are resolved in seconds, with employee satisfaction up 20% and HR operations costs down 50%.

Second Place — Capgemini

Capgemini transformed a global electronics enterprise’s month-end close into a governed, AI-run process, achieving more than 80% straight-through automated processing at 100% accuracy.

Third Place — Cognizant

Cognizant built an AI-first innovation center for Citizens Bank that reached production in under six months with zero attrition and targets $100 million in annual run-rate savings.

Best Services Eating Software

First Place — Genpact

Genpact’s Agentic operations model is live with 70+ enterprise clients (15% of the Fortune 100), embedding AI agents across accounts payable, procurement, R2R, insurance, and banking to replace labor-centric delivery.

Second Place — Firstsource

Firstsource replaced a labor-heavy collections model with its proprietary Kairos platform, reducing the Aptia operation from 270 to 70 FTEs and shifting more than half of its revenue to outcome-based terms.

Third Place — IBM Consulting

Hybrid-AI delivery platform running behind 150,000 consultants and 4,000+ digital workers across roughly 200 live client accounts, then productized and sold to clients as software—priced against the productivity it creates rather than the hours it replaces.

Best Software Eating Services

First Place — Humanize

The humanAIze platform performs SAP, Salesforce, and ServiceNow implementation work traditionally billed as consulting hours, reducing program staffing needs by roughly half across live client deployments.

Second Place — Kognitos

Kognitos enables business users to create automations in plain English and deploy them in hours rather than weeks. A supply chain client uses the platform to process more than 50,000 bills of lading each month without an IT team.

Third Place — Celonis

Process intelligence platform establishing a single operational knowledge model for Renault Group, enabling real-time balance sheet velocity and replacing disconnected analytics with a continuous agentic execution layer.

Best Startup / Emerging Firm

First Place — KUNGFU.AI

AI-native consulting and engineering firm that has automated 70% of $18B+ in annual loan factoring for Triumph Financial, collapsing funding time from 1-2 days to 30 seconds across 25M+ transactions per year.

Second Place — Aokah

Aokah’s GCC Execution Intelligence platform replaces periodic, consulting-led governance with continuous AI-driven orchestration. A Fortune 500 chemical manufacturer used it to cut GCC location shortlisting from 10 weeks to less than one week.

Third Place — Veltris

AI orchestration platform rebuilding healthcare revenue cycle decision rules with full explainability, validated against signed-off criteria before shipping and achieving 3x member portal adoption.

Meet the 2026 finalists

From more than 250 submissions, 31 nominations were selected as finalists across the four award categories.

Each represents a different example of how the traditional dividing line between software and services is breaking down, from established global providers reinventing their delivery models to emerging companies building AI-native approaches from the ground up.

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Firstsource — AI-native operations platform transforming service delivery across pensions, healthcare, and financial services, with 50%+ of revenue outcome-linked and a 270-to-70 FTE operating model at Aptia.

Genpact — AI-native accounts payable platform deployed for TI Automotive, lifting touchless processing from 27% to 80%+ with 95%+ invoice accuracy across 50,000+ invoices per month.

IBM — AI-led finance and operations transformation for Verizon, alongside deployments for the US Veterans Benefits Administration and Fortitude Re.

iOPEX Technologies — Always-on agentic intelligence layer deployed for Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions, replacing reactive service delivery with continuous, observation-led operations.

Sagility — AI-led reimagination of Medicare Advantage operations for Synchrony, shifting to an AI-reorchestrated platform with 40% turnaround improvement and up to 99% enrolment accuracy.

Skan AI — Observation-led AI platform live at Wells Fargo and Unum, replacing consulting interviews with ground-truth data from billions of actual work executions.

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) — Portfolio of seven named-enterprise SaS transformations spanning aerospace, security services, energy, steel, retail, HR, and procurement.

Wipro — AI-native payer operations platform replacing traditional BPO delivery with software-led services across Medicare, Medicaid, and commercial health plan workflows.

Ascendion — AI-powered delivery model for a Fortune 50 health plan (25M+ members), delivering 42% productivity uplift, 31% AHT reduction, and 60% faster time-to-market.

Capgemini — Real-time AI fraud detection platform for airline baggage operations, reducing fraudulent claims at production scale for a named airline.

Genzeon — AI-native prior-authorisation platform live on the CMS WISeR programme, processing 15,000+ Medicare cases with 100% TAT compliance.

GEP — Unified AI-native procurement platform managing $600B+ in annual spend for 1,000+ enterprise clients.

Hexaware Technologies — AI-powered legacy modernisation factory replacing proprietary analytics tools with open-source equivalents for a Canadian bank, cutting TCO by 25%.

Impetus Technologies — AI-powered data migration factory that has modernised 100M+ lines of legacy code across Fortune 100 and Fortune 200 clients.

VOIS — Vodafone’s proprietary agentic CX platform live in 8 markets, handling 50M+ conversations per month across 60+ languages.

Autonomize AI — AI operating layer live at three of the five largest US health plans, reducing prior-authorisation review time from 40 minutes to 4 minutes.

Lyzr AI — Sovereign enterprise AI agent platform enabling organisations to build, deploy, and govern AI agents on their own infrastructure.

Covasant — Agent lifecycle management platform governing multi-vendor AI agents within a single registry, deployed for a named global manufacturing and automation enterprise.

Genzeon — Patent-protected ‘Healthcare Brain’ architecture unifying prior authorization, patient engagement, and governance on one consistent state, live in production under the CMS Medicare WISeR Innovation Model.

NSOffice AI by Network Science — Enterprise AI platform providing a unified System of Context that reduces information retrieval and coordination time by 35–50%.

Hear from the 2026 award winners

HFS is bringing the winning companies together for two live conversations exploring the innovations behind their award-winning entries and what they reveal about the shift toward Services-as-Software.

September 15 | 10:00–11:00 a.m. ET

Services-as-Software Transformation + Services Eating Software

Ema · Capgemini · Sagility · Cognizant · IBM Consulting · Firstsource

Register to hear directly from the organizations recognized for setting the pace in Services-as-Software.

Can’t make it? Register anyway and we’ll send you the recording.

Register now

September 29 | 10:00–11:00 a.m. ET

Software Eating Services + Startup / Emerging Firm

Humanize · Kognitos · Celonis · KUNGFU.AI · Aokah · Veltris

Register to hear from the award winners challenging how enterprise work gets done.

Can’t make it? Register anyway and we’ll send you the recording.

Register now

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