PUBLISHED DATE: 2025-08-13 11:14:08

HFS HORIZONS REPORT

Generative Enterprise Services, 2025

An assessment of the Generative Enterprise services of service providers, addressing the why, what, how, and so what

Authors:
Phil Fersht, CEO and Chief Analyst
David Cushman, Executive Research Leader
Niti JhunJhunwala, Senior Analyst

Introduction

Enterprises need to stop asking “what can this technology do for us?” and instead start thinking “how do we need to change to unlock its potential?” The Generative Enterprise isn’t about sprinkling AI onto legacy processes; it’s about committing to wholesale transformation—rewriting operating models, reimagining customer experiences, and driving decisions with intelligence at scale.

GenAI exposes vulnerabilities that enterprises have swept under the rug for years—fragmented processes, inconsistent data governance, siloed systems, and, most importantly, cultures resistant to change. These aren’t new problems, but they’ve now become the gating factors to success. The organizations that tackle these issues head-on are the ones that will unlock GenAI’s true potential and become the formidable Generative Enterprises that dominate markets.

Despite the excitement and the widespread belief in the possibility of GenAI, it still feels like we are in the calm before the storm. Cross-enterprise AI-driven transformation is still very much an aspiration rather than a reality. This is the year that will change, as those that have committed to start are seeing significant returns. It’s not too late to take your leap to future prosperity so long as you’re serious about tackling your debt monsters—technical, data, process, skills, and culture.

"The Generative Enterprise is about more than deploying AI—it's about transforming how enterprises operate, innovate, and deliver value. Leaders must embed these trends strategically, fostering ecosystems, enabling collaboration, and rethinking traditional hierarchies to thrive in this dynamic era."

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction and research methodology
  2. Market dynamics
  3. Horizons results: Generative Enterprise Services, 2025
  4. Publicis Sapient profile: Generative Enterprise Services, 2025
  5. HFS Research authors

1. Introduction and Research Methodology

Welcome to our 2025 HFS Horizons’ Generative Enterprise services study. Services include advisory, frameworks, tools and solutions, implementation and delivery, maintenance, and optimization. This research study assesses the innovation and value potential of service provider capabilities across three distinct horizons:

Last year, our Generative Enterprise Horizons study was full of promise. In 2025, we are looking to deliver on that promise—embracing the need to both minimize costs AND deliver new sources of value.

This study assesses how well service providers are living up to that promise for enterprise customers through their Generative Enterprise services across the HFS Generative Enterprise value chain. The study aims to understand the why, what, how, and so what of those service offerings.

This year’s Generative Enterprise Services Horizons report addresses three key questions:

This report covers service providers across the Generative Enterprise value chain and excludes technology providers.

Executive Summary

  1. Horizon 3 Service Providers Revealed
    We assessed 40 service providers across their value propositions (the why), execution and innovation capabilities (the what), go-to-market strategy (the how), and market impact criteria (the so what). The Horizon 3 leaders (in alphabetical order) are Accenture, Ascendion, BCG, Capgemini, Cognizant, EY, Eviden, Genpact, HCLTech, IBM, Infosys, KPMG, McKinsey, NTT DATA, Publicis Sapient, TCS, Tech Mahindra, Virtusa, and Wipro. These service providers have demonstrated their ability to support various enterprises across the journey—from functional digital transformation through enterprise-wide modernization to creating new value through ecosystems. These leaders’ shared characteristics include: deep expertise across the Generative Enterprise value chain; a full-service approach across consulting, IT, and operations; a strong focus on innovation, internally and externally with partners; co-innovation with clients and partners; and proven impact and outcomes with clients around the world.
  2. What Enterprises Need from Service Providers
    The HFS Horizons model aligns closely with enterprise maturity. We asked the AI/GenAI leaders, interviewed as references for this study, to comment on the primary value delivered by their service provider partners today. An overwhelming percentage of respondents (80%) indicated that the value realized today is Horizon 1—functional digital transformation focused on digital and data foundations, process redesign, and enabling AI. However, this story is rapidly changing. There’s an enhanced focus on leveraging service providers to help achieve enterprise transformation by enabling alignment across the front, middle, and back offices and driving growth and new value creation by leveraging AI and the ecosystem to redefine workflows and processes. Enterprise leaders should select partners based on the value they seek. The most effective service providers of the future should enable their organization’s growth and transformation across the ecosystem continuum.
  3. How Service Providers Are Meeting Enterprise Needs
    As enterprises evolve and mature across the Horizons model, service providers are learning and building AI/GenAI capabilities to support these ever-changing needs. In this study, we found a large gap between enterprises’ need for Horizon 2 services (enterprise transformation) and service offerings from providers. Even in terms of delivery approach, there is an aspiration for AI-led agentic services. These require high enterprise investment and ROI, but there are not enough scaled GenAI examples to prove business value. Undeterred, service providers are investing in developing consulting and full-stack capabilities, skills, AI labs, solutions, and platforms; expanding partnerships with various cloud, data, and AI firms as well as academia; and adopting GenAI internally as ‘client zero’ to prove value and share learnings of this emerging technology with clients. Overcoming the five debts—tech, data, process, culture, and skills—and redefining organizational processes are necessary pathways to cultivating new forms of value and ecosystem-enabled growth. Increased productivity, efficiency gains, and customer experience (CX) elevation are ongoing, enabled by point solutions and performance-based commercial models. Responsible AI and regulatory compliance are perpetual but work still needs to be done for firms with data privacy concerns.
  4. Voice of the Customer (VOC)
    We conducted deep-dive interviews with more than 70 enterprise leaders as part of our VOC research for this study. AI/GenAI leaders showed a clear pattern of leveraging service providers to enable their future growth, given their quality, AI expertise, co-innovation, and best-of-breed technologies. Enterprises are largely satisfied with providers for the basics, averaging 8.3 out of 10 for CSAT. However, satisfaction with business alignment is lower than tech implementation from service providers, and clients expect more creative commercial models, IP development/R&D, breadth and depth of industry-specific AI offerings, and use of AI-specific partners.
  5. Voice of the Partners
    Service providers work with a range of partners to meet the needs of their clients, including hyperscalers, cloud, data, infrastructure, enterprise, and AI-specific partners. Satisfaction is generally high from a partner experience standpoint, which bodes well for downstream client impact. However, compared to clients, partners believe that service providers offer enterprises a higher level of value. Enterprises need to better consider the value delivered via ecosystems.
  6. Voice of the Employees
    Service providers are investing in and curating AI/GenAI training programs for their employees. 98% of the employees we interviewed claimed they received formal training from their employers. However, more than 80% of them felt the training was insufficient. This gap highlights the need for holistic, interdisciplinary training programs that blend technical, ethical, strategic, and communication skills.

HFS’ Generative Enterprise Services Value Chain, 2024

40 Service Providers Evaluated in This Report

Accenture, Ascendion, Bain & Company, BCG, Birlasoft, Brillio, Capgemini, Ciklum, Coforge, Cognizant, Deloitte, Eviden, EXL, EY, Firstsource, Genpact, HCLTech, Hexaware, Hitachi Digital Services, IBM, IGT Solutions, Infosys, KPMG, LTIMindtree, McKinsey & Company, Movate, Mphasis, NTT DATA, Persistent, Publicis Sapient, PwC, Randstad Digital, Sonata Software, Sutherland, TCS, Tech Mahindra, UST, Virtusa, Wipro, WNS

Sources of Data

Horizons Assessment Methodology

The HFS Horizons – Generative Enterprise Services report evaluates the capabilities of providers to understand the why, what, how, and so what of their Generative Enterprise services offering. Our assessment is based on input from clients, partners, and employees and augmented with analyst perspectives.

Each dimension is further broken down by horizon, with increasing expectations for Horizon 2 and Horizon 3 providers in terms of innovation, co-creation, and impact.

2. Market Dynamics

Top Seven Trends from HFS’ Generative Enterprise Horizons Report

  1. Rise of Agentic AI and Impact on Value Beyond Point Solutions
    • Agentic AI brings action to AI, embedding it in solutions delivering end-to-end processes and driving business value outcomes beyond point solutions.
  2. Services-as-Software Across the Value Chain
    • Services firms are replacing labor arbitrage with AI-powered software, changing how Generative Enterprise services are delivered, especially in software development and consulting.
  3. Democratization of AI Through Generative Models
    • GenAI enables real-time, natural language data interaction, empowering every employee to interact with AI systems, flattening hierarchies, and decentralizing decision-making.
  4. GenAI as the New Data Powerhouse
    • GenAI revolutionizes data management, generating insights for faster, more informed decisions and enabling new business models.
  5. AI-Driven Ecosystems: The New Competitive Frontier
    • Success with GenAI depends on ecosystem collaboration, blending industry-specific solutions with foundational technologies.
  6. Hyperpersonalization and the Era of Human-AI Collaboration
    • GenAI enables tailored experiences at scale, embedding human-AI collaboration across the enterprise.
  7. Regulation, Deregulation, and China
    • Regulatory changes in the US and competition from China require enterprise leaders to select responsible AI solutions and avoid PR disasters.

The Great Services Transition

We are firmly along an S-Curve evolution from people to technology arbitrage that the Generative Enterprise demands. The entire financial construct of services relationships is being reinvented to capitalize on the complex ecosystem of AI platform players, hyperscalers, data integration products, automation tools, LLM builders, and so on.

Key challenges:

Clients must sign up for process reinvention and data transformation, and providers need the right to work with their customers, or the whole thing simply erodes to the bottom.

Services and Ops Tech Vision 2030

The need to scale services without scaling people is upon us, and with it comes a massive opportunity if both ambitious enterprises and service providers are prepared to change how they buy and sell routine services and professional expertise. With the application of software platforms, agentic solutions, and, ultimately, autonomous services mimicked by software, we are on the fast track to reaching autonomous, human-lite nirvana of scalable, profitable, secure, and affordable services by 2030.

Evolution of AI: RPA, GenAI, and Agentic AI

Addressing Organizational Debts

Ambitious enterprises and their service partners must address data, process, skills, and technology debts to succeed with GenAI. This involves aligning data needs, recreating processes, developing new skill sets, and making strategic technology investments.

AI/GenAI Adoption Metrics (2023-2024)

Service Provider Performance and Client Needs

The Generative Enterprise Ecosystem

A comprehensive landscape of applications (consumer, productivity, enterprise stack, industry verticals) and infrastructure (deployment, training, open-source models, storage, cloud, hardware) collectively enable the AI ecosystem, supporting diverse use cases and business needs.

Employee Training in GenAI

3. Horizons Results: Generative Enterprise Services, 2025

Summary of Providers Assessed

HFS Horizons for Generative Enterprise Services

4. Publicis Sapient Profile: Generative Enterprise Services, 2025

Co-creating customer experience outcomes and accelerating adoption with a strong partner network

Strengths:

Development Opportunities:

Partnerships:

Clients:

Global Operations:

Flagship Internal IP:

5. HFS Research Authors

Phil Fersht
CEO and Chief Analyst
phil.fersht@hfsresearch.com

Phil Fersht is widely recognized as the world’s leading industry analyst focused on the reinvention of business operations to exploit technological innovations and the globalization of talent. He coined the term “Generative Enterprise” in 2023, articulating the pursuit of AI technologies based on large language models (LLMs) and ChatGPT to reap huge business benefits to organizations. He also coined "OneOffice" in 2016, describing the vision for future business operations amidst the impact of cloud, automation, AI, and disruptive digital business models.

David Cushman
Executive Research Leader
david.cushman@hfsresearch.com

David leads the Emerging Technology Practice, tracking OneOffice and OneEcosystem enablers from automation, GenAI and AI, data and design thinking, process orchestration, workflow, and intelligence, metaverse and Web3. He is the author of The 10 Principles of Open Business and leads the HFS Hot Tech program.

Niti JhunJhunwala
Senior Analyst
niti@hfsresearch.com

Niti covers banking and financial services and GenAI, and contributes to competitive intelligence and the HFS Market Index. She has over six years of market research experience and holds an MBA in Finance and Marketing and a B. Tech in Information Technology.

About HFS

HFS Research is a leading global research and advisory firm helping Fortune 500 companies through IT and business transformation with bold insights and actionable strategies. With an unmatched platform to reach, advise, and influence Global 2000 executives, we empower organizations to make decisive technology and service choices. Backed by fearless research and an impartial outside perspective, our insights give you the edge to stay ahead.

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