Saurabh Gupta
President, Research and Advisory Services

Saurabh Gupta is President, Research and Advisory Services at HFS. He sets the strategic research focus and agenda for HFS Research, understanding and predicting the needs of the industry and ensuring that HFS maintains its position as the strongest impact thought leader for business operations and services research. He oversees HFS’ global research function, managing the global team of analysts and operations across the US, Europe, and Asia.

He is a recognized thought leader, and he’s passionate about solving business problems and bringing big ideas to life. With more than two decades of experience across client, provider, advisory, and analyst roles, he brings a uniquely realistic and wide-ranging perspective to our industry’s challenges and opportunities. He has authored more than 200 research reports; he is a frequent speaker and regularly quoted in industry publications. He is well-known for spotting disruptive technology trends like blockchain, Web3, metaverse, cloud, AI, and automation and predicting their implications for different stakeholders through frameworks like the OneOffice™ and OneEcosystem™.

Before joining HFS, Saurabh led strategy for Genpact’s CFO and transformation services, helped shape the business services strategy for AbbVie, managed Everest Group’s global BPS practice, and worked as a techno-functional consultant at Infosys.

Saurabh is a Mechanical Engineer from Delhi College of Engineering and holds an MBA from IIT Bombay. He lives in Chicago with his wife and daughter. He is a fan of Indian cricket and European soccer.

  • Time running out for legacy Big 4? Nothing has disrupted the cozy status quo of big enterprise technology transformations more...Read More

  • Not even God can save DXC!

    December 21, 2023 | ,

    DXC Technology's latest play is to bring Raul Fernandez off the bench as the new interim chief and move on from a difficult four years under Mike Salvino, who's passing the torch. But when you look at the challenges facing this firm, you might just come to the conclusion that not even God can turn this one around.Let's not kid ourselves; this isn't your usual passing of the baton – it's more like handing off a ticking time bomb. The company's market value is literally running on fumes and barely a third of its revenue numbers. And that's not just a hiccup – it's a full-blown identity crisis.Read More

  • Services firms are out of runway. They must forget Labor Arbitrage and conform to Technology Arbitrage

    December 10, 2023 | ,

    The fundamental value creation lever in the legacy Labor Arbitrage era has been the centralization of people in a global delivery model. The fundamental value lever in the Technology Arbitrage era is all about architecting and orchestrating the rapidly changing technology ecosystem in line with the client’s business model. It’s past time for the IT and BPO Services industry to jump to a new S-curve driven by Technology Arbitrage if they wish to get back to another season of hockey stick growth.Read More

  • Ray Kurzweil to Keynote the HFS Spring Summit 2024!

    We are thrilled to announce Ray Kurzweil as our first confirmed keynote at the HFS Spring Summit 2024, scheduled to take place from May 8th to May 9th in New York.Read More

  • Industry Cloud must be about value creation, not re-badging IP… Unveiling the HFS Industry Cloud Continuum

    Many hyperscalers and service providers are merely repackaging and rebadging existing IP and marketing it as “Industry Cloud.” However, at HFS we believe Industry Cloud can become the Holy Grail for Cloud-native transformation, but only if the focus is on new business models and value chain disruption.Read More

  • As ChatGPT goes Enterprise, here are Ten GenAI Reality Checks you need to take…

    September 03, 2023 | , ,

    Barely ten months after its birth changed the world of technology, OpenAI unleashes ChatGPT Enterprise, where enterprises now have "Enterprise-grade security and privacy, unlimited higher-speed GPT-4 access, longer context windows for processing longer inputs, advanced data analysis capabilities, customization options, and much more."Assuming the 20 enterprises that road-tested ChatGPT Enterprise experienced these benefits in double-quick time, you have to take a serious look at scaling up GenAI tools or risk getting left behind with the most hyped technology since the Internet came to be... here are 10 reality checkpoints you must considerRead More

  • Krithi’s first TCS re-org… One step forward and two steps back?

    August 03, 2023 | ,

    Is the new TCS org structure really going to propel the company forward in the AI-driven era where scarce skills in areas such as GenAI are at a premium and intra-company collaboration and training are more critical than ever?  Does having an all-male leadership team send the right message to clients and employees, where diversity is so important to its culture and enticing the best young talent? Phil Fersht and Saurabh Gupta look into new TCS CEO K Krithivasan's first major re-organization of his TCS tenure.Read More

  • IBM Watson missed the AI revolution, but Watsonx could become the heartbeat of the Generative Enterprise

    May 10, 2023 | ,

    IBM unveiled its multi-model and multi-cloud Watsonx to drive AI-first enterprises - what we are calling "The Generative Enterprise" at HFS. IBM is describing the platform as a "full technology stack" for training, tuning, and deploying AI models, including foundation and large language models while ensuring tight data governance controls. In our view, Watsonx is the first enterprise-grade offering to address the Generative Enterprise holistically.  Here’s our interpretation of WatsonxRead More

  • Supply chain customers embrace agility and resilience — HFS Horizons, Supply Chain Services 2023

    The HFS Horizons report on supply chain services features 18 providers across three Horizons manifesting incremental business value for enterprise clients. Horizon 1 focuses on a linear supply chain driving functional optimization, followed by Horizon 2, which retains the values of Horizon 1 plus drives circular supply chains with end-to-end transformation capabilities, creating unmatched stakeholder experience with a “OneOffice” mindset. At the pinnacle is Horizon 3, which encapsulates all values of previous Horizons plus encompasses a networked and autonomous vision of the supply chain, driving completely new sources of value with a “OneEcosystem” approach.Read More

  • Redefining leadership roles is critical to be an effective Autonomous Enterprise

    A strong governance capability has the talent, tech infrastructure, automation, and AI to deliver the data that will drive success with minimal manual interventions that impede progress and speed. The ultimate goal of an autonomous enterprise allows us humans to remove ourselves from some parts of the system so that we can make continuous improvements to the ecosystem as a whole.What are the leadership roles needed to understand the data they need? How can we build the right internal teams and external partnerships to support an autonomous enterprise? And how can we design smart governance to manage key decisions faster with some degree of confidence? Read More