2025 State of HR Technology and Service Delivery
ISG’s 2025 Survey reveals how leading enterprises are moving beyond HR transformation to deliver optimization, integration, and AI-enabled performance.
Advisory
HR Technology & Outsourcing Solutions
Expert advisory services and insights on HR transformation, HR technology, HR outsourcing and more.
What Is Transformational HR?
It’s HR that engages the workforce of tomorrow, drives operational efficiency and delivers value to the business in a new way.
Transforming HR means reorienting the role HR plays in the organization. Rethink your operating model and boost its capabilities by leveraging the right technology, the right delivery model and an effective sourcing ecosystem.
HR Transformation
Reimagine the Employee Experience
The
workplace of the future requires the workforce of future. How do you attract and retain top talent?
You need a workforce strategy that not only aligns HR with business goals but also leverages HR as an enterprise leader. Optimize processes, roles, and shared services so you can help the business define success – and lead the charge.
HR Technology
Revolutionize HR with Technology
Is your HR technology holding you back? Manual processes and inflexible systems are frustrating and inefficient.
You need to balance technical architecture, data security and the use of emerging technologies like machine learning and chatbots with a deep understanding of HR functionality, processes and user expectations.
HR Outsourcing
Optimize Sourcing to Save
Wondering if there’s a better way to “get it all done?” HR has a broad set of outsourcing markets—from HR contact centers and payroll administration to recruitment and learning, there are outsourcing partners to support your team.
ISG’s HR Technology & Transformation experts are the market leaders in helping enterprises transform their HR organizations through strategic use of outsourcing. We bring the domain experience, sourcing know-how, best-in-class methodologies
and world-class market data you need to assess, source, benchmark and manage your HR delivery partner relationships.
In a highly competitive and technologically maturing HCM marketplace, ISG's Stacey Cadigan, Partner at ISG, and Greg Vickrey, Director at ISG, sit down to share their thoughts on HCM differentiators that truly matter, the investments being made by leading software providers in their product and how an enterprise organization can evaluate a long-term strategic partner.
The market has moved from ambition to accountability.
AI investment is accelerating, but results remain uneven. Only one in four initiatives is meeting revenue impact expectations, at an average spend of $1.3M per use case. Enterprises are no longer asking whether AI works. They are being asked to prove that it pays.
What We Deliver
AI strategy, governance and intelligence, built for execution.
Autonomous Enterprise
Operations built for autonomous execution, not retrofitted for it.
We help you identify where AI agents deliver the most value, restructure workflows around them and build the accountability models that keep autonomous execution auditable. The enterprises that win won't be the ones that reacted. They'll be the ones that designed for it first.
Autonomy-Level Pricing
Pricing that reflects how AI-enabled services are actually delivered.
We give enterprises transparent, benchmarkable pricing models that tag each resource unit with the autonomy level used to deliver it. As AI capability advances, your pricing keeps pace. Both buyers and providers can quantify what that progress is worth.
AI & Software Intelligence
Build-versus-buy decisions grounded in what AI is actually delivering.
We bring analysis of more than $2.6 billion in tracked AI spend to every sourcing decision. Procurement, technology and finance leaders get the independent intelligence to rationalize vendor portfolios and hold providers accountable to measurable outcomes.
AI Governance
Governance that accelerates AI adoption rather than constraining it.
We embed controls at the point of data creation, define accountability for autonomous actions and build adaptive frameworks that keep pace with AI without impeding it. Enterprises that get this right don't just manage risk. They build the trust that lets them scale faster.
AI Strategy
AI investment aligned to where impact is most achievable.
We ground strategy in research across 2,400 enterprise use cases, aligning investment to where impact is proven and designing the data, talent and governance foundations that move AI from pilots into the workflows that drive commercial results.
AI Maturity Index
A clear view of where you stand and a roadmap to where AI starts delivering.
We benchmark your AI readiness against peers across 75 countries, identify the dimensions holding you back and give you a personalized roadmap to close the gap.
The market today
Enterprise AI has moved out of IT and into the revenue line.
AI investment is shifting decisively toward revenue-generating functions. CRM automation, sales enablement and forecasting have replaced chatbots and IT productivity tools as the leading use case priorities, reflecting enterprise recognition that productivity gains alone do not satisfy board-level scrutiny. At the same time, use cases in production have doubled since 2024, and the portfolio is diversifying rapidly, with over 300 distinct function and industry-specific use cases now in active deployment.
ISG research across 2,400 enterprise use cases shows that the strongest AI returns are currently concentrated in compliance, risk management and quality control, not in the growth and cost outcomes most enterprises originally set out to achieve
The gap between where enterprises are investing and where AI is actually delivering is the defining commercial tension of 2025. Organizations that close it by targeting functions with structured, revenue-attributable data and clear ROI measures will establish performance benchmarks that compress the window for competitors still cycling through pilots. The standard is being set now.
Where enterprises are feeling the pressure
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Business outcomes are lagging AI ambitionEnterprises are scaling Al faster than they are realizing value from it. The number of use cases in production doubled between 2024 and 2025, yet only one in four initiatives is meeting revenue impact expectations, and broad cost savings remain elusive. At an average spend of $1.3M per use case, the ROI gap is sharpening board-level scrutiny and forcing a harder question: are we building Al for impact, or for activity?
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Data infrastructure exposing deferred investmentAl does fail in isolation. It fails on the foundations beneath it. Most enterprises are running modern Al on architectures built for reporting and compliance. Generative and agentic Al demand real-time contextually rich, governed data at the point of use. Without it, pilots stall and value dissipate before it reaches the business.
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The barrier to scale is organizational, not technicalOrganizational readiness as the bigger constraint on Al adoption, not talent or tooling. Workflows haven't been redesigned. Decision rights haven't shifted. Enterprises that treat Al as a pure technology deployment, without investing in the human side of adoption, consistently report underwhelming ROI.
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Agentic AI is outpacing governanceAs Al moves from generating outputs to executing tasks autonomously, the governance gap widens. Agentic Systems introduce a new class of risk that static compliance frameworks were never designed to catch. Governing what Al does, not just what it produces, is now a business-critical requirement.
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Embracing a cloud-based ERP application may be the single most important move you can make to springboard your organization into true digital transformation.
