2026 Key Issues Study shows AI driving 25%+ improvements across key customer, employee and productivity outcomes

MIAMI -- (Business Wire)

The Hackett Group, Inc. (NASDAQ: HCKT), a leading Gen AI consulting and enterprise digital transformation firm, today announced findings from its 2026 Enterprise Key Issues Study, revealing that enterprises are beginning to realize transformational impact from their artificial intelligence (AI) investments. The research shows that leading organizations are moving beyond incremental AI deployment to reimagine their operating models and driving significant gains across customer and employee experience, risk management and compliance, and business productivity.

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AI investments are paying off: The percentage of organizations reporting transformative levels of value to achieve specific business goals or outcomes is encouraging. A few organizations even report breakthrough quality and productivity gains exceeding 40%. The Hackett Innovation Awards and our work with dozens of organizations on agentic workflows reinforce these findings.

“What distinguishes these leading organizations is how they are leveraging AI to redesign work,” said Kyle McNabb, principal and Gen AI Executive Advisory program leader at The Hackett Group^®. “They are moving beyond historical rules-based automation approaches and leveraging the multiplier effect of AI’s cognitive automation to structurally reshape their operations, workforce, and enterprise performance.”

How leading organizations are translating Gen AI into enterprise impact

The report’s data shows enterprises are advancing AI across a broad range of objectives. While the magnitude of benefits varies, the percentage of organizations reporting 25%+ improvements is significant and signals growing operational maturity. Key findings:

• AI is reshaping the customer experience: 54% of organizations are scaling AI to improve customer satisfaction and experience, and 76% of these see 25% or greater improvement in key metrics. This signals a broader shift in how enterprises are using AI to deepen engagement, personalize interactions and create new value pathways across the customer life cycle.
• Risk and compliance are entering a new era of maturity: 50% of leaders are scaling AI to strengthen risk management and compliance. These early efforts are paying off: 57% have seen improvements of 25% or more in employee experience.
• Business productivity and workforce experience gains signal AI’s operational maturity: 69% of organizations are scaling AI to improve employee productivity, with 80% reporting gains of 25% or more. Organizations are beginning to design core processes around AI to accelerate decision-making, improve execution efficiency and elevate the employee experience.

Building the foundations for enterprise-scale Gen AI

To move from fragmented adoption to sustained, enterprisewide impact, organizations must strengthen governance, clarify AI talent strategies, simplify foundational processes and technology landscapes, and establish more disciplined approaches to measuring value and performance impact. The Hackett Innovation Award winners highlight what’s possible when companies embrace the generational opportunity to reimagine work with AI. Bosch, Johnson & Johnson, MTN Group, and Roche Turkiye have achieved dramatic reductions in cycle times, significant return on investment (200%-2,500%), and improvements across employee, customer, and clinical experience – demonstrating the potential of agentic workflows to unlock new levels of enterprise value.

The path to the agentic enterprise

The research identifies a set of actions that distinguish performance leaders from those still struggling to unlock value:

• Anchor enterprise strategies in a clear, fact-based assessment of AI opportunities and threats.
• Build robust process intelligence capabilities that expose complex workflows and enable deliberate, high-impact collaboration between human talent and AI agents.
• Take a pragmatic, problem-specific approach, rather than attempting to fix talent, data. or ethics challenges simultaneously.

The future is agentic

According to the study, organizations that act with urgency to evolve their operating models with AI will be best positioned to realize the full potential of the agentic enterprise: faster decision-making, higher productivity, improved customer and employee experiences, and a new competitive advantage.

“What we’re seeing is a clear separation emerging between organizations that treat Gen AI as an efficiency lever and those that recognize it as a catalyst for enterprise-level transformation,” said Andy Warzecha, principal, Executive Advisory practice leader. “As cognitive automation and agentic workflows mature, that gap will widen – rewarding organizations that act decisively to reimagine their operating models, and making it increasingly difficult for others to catch up.”

Download the report.

About The Hackett Group^®

The Hackett Group, Inc. (NASDAQ: HCKT) is a Gen AI strategic consulting and digital transformation firm that enables Digital World Class^® performance. Using Hackett AI XPLR™, ZBrain™, XT™, AIXelerator™, AskHackett™ and Quantum Leap^® platforms, the company’s experienced professionals and engineers help organizations realize the power of Gen AI from ideation through implementation to achieve quantifiable, breakthrough results with unprecedented speed, allowing it to be key architects of their Gen AI journey. The company’s expertise is grounded in unparalleled best practices insights from enterprise performance benchmarks from the world’s leading businesses – including 97% of the Dow Jones Industrials, 90% of the Fortune 100, 70% of the DAX 40 and 51% of the FTSE 100. Visit us at www.thehackettgroup.com.

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Source: The Hackett Group, Inc.