HFS PODCASTS

Join Saurabh Gupta and Rita Scroggin in a compelling discussion about the transformative power of diversity in corporate leadership. Discover how Firstboard.io is leading the charge to place more women in boardrooms, challenging traditional norms, and fostering innovation and inclusivity in governance.

What you'll hear:

• This episode delves into the mission of Firstboard.io, the challenges of diversifying boardrooms, and the urgent need for modernizing leadership to keep pace with technological advancements like AI.
• Rita shares her insights on breaking insider networks, building new ecosystems, and the strategic importance of gender parity in corporate boards.

Key takeaways:

• The impact of Firstboard.io's mission on corporate leadership and diversity.
• Challenges posed by traditional board appointment processes and insider networks.
• The importance of creating new networks for visibility and board readiness.
• The disconnect between AI advancements and board expertise, and the leadership gaps that hinder innovation.
• Balancing short-term financial results with long-term strategic vision in boardrooms.
• The influence of company size, reserves, and industry on board composition and decision-making.
• The future of gender parity on boards and the need for nimble, inclusive leadership.
• Best practices for private companies in adding independent directors early for growth and scaling.

AI is both exposing and accelerating the fight against tech debt, but it’s not a silver bullet.

In this episode of HFS Unfiltered Stories, Saurabh Gupta, President at HFS Research, speaks with Amardeep Setty, Director - Global IS - Customer Experience, at Nissan Motor Corporation, and Pinak Kiran Vedalankar, Group VP Technology & International Head of Engineering at Publicis Sapient, about what it really takes to become “AI-ready.” The discussion goes beyond technology to focus on mindset, governance, data readiness, and the shift toward new operating models.From using AI to tackle technical debt to introducing the concept of “context debt,” this conversation explores how enterprises must rethink architecture, decision-making, and transformation itself.

Cognizant Chief AI Officer Babak Hodjat - Head of the firm’s AI lab in San Francisco, tackles the realities of scaling agentic AI across the enterprise, with HFS Executive Research Leader David Cushman.

Key points discussed include:

• Where multi-agent systems break first - and what that means for the state of progress in agentic AI.
• How an agent OS - a standardized layer for governance, orchestration, observability, data trust, and workforce integration, helps enterprises handle the complexity ceiling they will inevitably hit when scaling the use of agentic AI.
• And what’s the impact of the newly emerged OpenClaw and its promise of end-to-end workflows?

Read the associated Market Impact Report “Design your agent OS to win the AI future” here: https://www.hfsresearch.com/research/design-your-agent-os-to-win-the-ai-future/

In the latest episode of Unfiltered Stories, Sam Duncan, Practice Leader at HFS, sat down with Paul Brody, Former Global Blockchain Leader at EY, and Clare Adelgren, Global Blockchain Leader at EY, to discuss the findings of the latest HFS Enterprise Blockchain Services Horizon. They concluded that enterprise blockchain is very much alive, but it's become all the right kinds of boring.

Key discussed points include:

• Serious players never stopped investing
• The core drivers of enterprise blockchain today (stablecoins, tokenization)
• How engagements can move to production
• What differentiates leaders in the market

If you think enterprise blockchain is dead, think again.

Read the associated HFS Horizon Report here: https://www.hfsresearch.com/research/hfs-horizons-enterprise-blockchain-services-2025/

Is AI truly transforming insurance, or is it just the latest industry buzzword?

In this episode of HFS Unfiltered, Saurabh Gupta, President at HFS Research, sat down with Prashant Hinge, Chief Information & Transformation Officer at MSIG USA, and Ian Maher, Research Fellow & Senior Advisor at HFS Research, to explore what it really takes to move AI from hype to measurable business value.

From underwriting and claims to leadership alignment and talent fears, this candid conversation explores why most AI pilots never scale, and what separates the 5% that actually make it into production.

They discuss:

• Why AI is just a tool, not a strategy
• The gap between ambition and reality
• How AI impacts insurance P&L, not just productivity
• The real leadership challenge behind transformation
• Why employee fear is an opportunity, not a barrier
• The biggest mistake insurers make when scaling AI

If you’re navigating AI in a highly regulated, legacy-heavy industry like insurance, this discussion is a must-watch.

Everyone wants to be AI-first. But no one wants to fund it. In this HFS Unfiltered Stories conversation, Saurabh Gupta, President at HFS Research, sits down with Kailash Attal, Chief Solutions Officer at UST, to tackle one of the toughest questions facing enterprises today: How do you fund AI when budgets are tight, and legacy costs are high?

With CFO scrutiny increasing and capital discipline at an all-time high, enterprises can’t simply “wait for the next budget cycle.” Instead, a new operating model is emerging, a self-funded transformation, where savings generated from optimization are reinvested directly into AI and innovation.

They together explored:

• Why 8 out of 10 enterprises say they cannot wait to transform
• How to combine “run” and “transform” into one operating model
• Why AI is blurring the lines between IT and business
• How services-as-software becomes realistic through structured self-funding
• What must change culturally and operationally to make this work

This isn’t about cost-cutting. It’s about creating a flywheel of savings, reinvestment, and growth, and if your organization is struggling with the how of AI, this conversation is for you.

For more insights, read our POV, Stop waiting for budget: How enterprises are funding transformation from within: https://www.hfsresearch.com/research/stop-waiting-for-budget-how-enterprises-are-funding-transformation-from-within/

Learn more about UST’s approach to self-funded transformation here: https://www.ust.com/en/sft

If you’re interested in discussing SFT with UST, you can connect with their team here: https://www.ust.com/en/contact-us

Everyone understands why AI matters. The value is clear. The technology is evolving at breakneck speed. But here’s the real question: how do you actually make it work at scale?

In this episode of HFS Unfiltered Stories, Saurabh Gupta, President at HFS Research, sat down with Thiru Venkatachalam, VP & Senior Partner, Enterprise AI Transformation Leader at IBM Consulting, to tackle the biggest issue enterprises face today: moving beyond endless pilots and into real, production-grade AI.

Over 90% of enterprises are still stuck in “pilot purgatory.” So what’s missing?

They discussed:

• Why enterprise AI is very different from the ChatGPT consumer moment
• The hidden “enterprise debts” holding organizations back
• How to think about AI ROI across short-term wins, competitive plays, and long-term moonshots
• Why cost reduction alone is the wrong lens
• The disruption AI is creating in IT software and services
• Why AI transformation must be CEO-led
• The role of platforms, governance, and security in scaling AI

This is a practical conversation about what it really takes to operationalize AI, from data and org design to leadership mindset.

In this HFS and Genpact CX Videocast, Melissa Fersht and Genpact’s Global Head of CX, Sachin Pai, explore how agentic AI is reshaping customer experience. CX is moving beyond chatbots and self-service to a future where AI doesn’t just assist customers, it acts on their behalf.

They examine the shift from handle-time metrics to P&L impact, the growing capability of AI in emotionally sensitive interactions, and the coming reversal of “press zero for a human” toward AI-first engagement.

The conversation highlights how roles will evolve from frontline execution to designing, governing, and improving intelligent agentic systems, signaling a major inflection point for CX, operations, and workforce transformation that’s coming well before 2030.

Key points discussed include:

• Self-service is dead. The future is served by AI, and this signals a paradigm shift from deflection to delegation.
• Emotional labor is no longer a sticking point. Generative pre-trained transformers are at a point where the emotional connection they can draw is exceeding what people can do.
• CX measurements are no longer about productivity, it’s about metrics that directly impact a P&L statement.
• Humans at the helm: our role moves from operators to supervisors, designers, and ethicists. We will be the ones who fix those agentic systems, improve the algorithms, and feed them with the right data.

In this HFS Research videocast with Mindsprint, Ashish Chaturvedi speaks with Rohit Sharma and Unnikrishnan Sasikumar on how supply chains are moving from visibility to intelligence amid disruption—shifting from AI pilots to outcome-led transformation (working capital, margin, customer experience). They explore what’s driving demand today including real-time planning, control towers, supplier collaboration, predictive analytics and what’s next: agentic AI for exception handling and the path to autonomous supply chains, grounded in trustworthy data foundations and an ecosystem approach across SAP/Microsoft cores plus specialist startups.

Key discussion points include:

1. Enterprise demand today is still centered on “visibility + decision support.” Most current programs focus on real-time planning, control towers, supplier collaboration, and AI-driven dashboards/analytics to enable faster decisions during disruption.
2. Clear shift from tactical work to integrated, tech-enabled operations. Buyers are moving away from manual Excel forecasting and siloed portals toward integrated solutions that support automated exception handling (including agentic AI), plus broader ecosystem collaboration and traceability.
3. A widening “spend today vs build tomorrow” gap is shaping strategy. Enterprises are still investing heavily in analytics modernization, cloud, and data foundations, while major tech vendors are pushing hard on generative AI and agentic architectures—creating a sequencing challenge.
4. Trustworthy data is the gating factor for autonomous supply chains. The conversation emphasizes that without strong data foundations (freshness, accuracy, governance, and resolving conflicting data sources), autonomy can create bad decisions (e.g., stock-out risk when systems think safety stock exists).
5. Organizational capabilities matter as much as technology. Beyond platforms and tools, capability building and guardrails (e.g., CoE / governance frameworks) are positioned as essential to unlock value from data and AI.
6. The partner stack is hybrid: ERP core plus startup innovation. SAP and Microsoft are described as dominant “core” stacks, while many enterprises augment them with specialist startups/scale-ups for niche planning, visibility, risk, and sustainability, requiring an ecosystem approach.
7. Progress is real, but not linear. Enterprises are still getting foundations right, even as the tech investment trajectory points clearly toward more autonomous, AI-driven supply chain operations.

Read the HFS Horizons Report on Intelligent Supply Chain Services 2025: https://www.hfsresearch.com/research/hfs-horizons-intelligent-supply-chain-services-2025

In this HFS interview, Genpact’s Yasir Andrabi and Macdonald Okolie discuss why AI has so far fallen short of expectations in insurance—and what needs to change. The conversation explores how agentic AI, data-driven underwriting, dynamic risk prioritization, and the Genpact Insurance Policy Suite are helping insurers move beyond basic workflow automation to fundamentally rethink underwriting judgment, capacity management, and underwriting economics.

In the discussion, Yasir Andrabi, Agentic AI Leader for Insurance, and Macdonald Okolie, Global Head of Insurance Underwriting Practice at Genpact, outline a clear reason insurance AI hasn’t moved the needle: most insurers have digitized underwriting workflows without addressing deeper issues around data quality and decision-making.

Reviewing the Genpact Insurance Policy Suite, the conversation focuses on shifting underwriting from speed to judgment—using agentic, data-driven prioritization to direct limited underwriting capacity toward the risks that matter most, based on profitability, risk-adjusted returns, and likelihood of binding.

By embedding third-party and exposure data while maintaining clear human-in-the-loop controls for accountability and regulatory compliance, Yasir and Don frame underwriting AI not as another layer of automation, but as a structural lever for changing the economics of underwriting.