How CIOs Can Hold on to their New Pandemic Power
When the entire world switched overnight to remote work in March 2020, the one role in the organization that truly made it happen was the CIO.
Advisory
Strategy
Optimize how you work, where you invest and how you drive business objectives.
Unleash the Power of a Target Operating Model (TOM)
A successful strategy is one that you can execute. Execution cannot be separated from strategy in our agile world. Streamline your workflow to support the speed of business. Establish new roles, responsibilities and skillsets to meet business demand. Invest in the right technologies and automation to optimize delivery.
Let us help you design a strategic target operating model and provider ecosystem that allows you to optimize how you deliver IT services.
Build “How” and “Who” Strategies
No strategy can be executed in isolation.
Creating a strategy without considering your outsourcing and implementation partners is a design flaw. Other advisors can help you decide on “what” you should do. We focus our strategies on the “how” and “with whom.”
ISG’s benchmark and industry peer data, business case support, technical know-how and transformation roadmap design set the industry standards. Your strategies benefit from our unrivaled experience. Plus, unlike our competitors, ISG has no conflicts
of interest and does not perform traditional implementations, allowing us to maintain an unbiased perspective.
With over $467 billion (and an additional $20bn YoY) in advised deals and unparalleled benchmarking and contractual data, no other advisory firm comes close to our level of market engagement and experience. Our strategies separate trend and technology
hype from reality so you can execute realistic change with your partners and achieve your goals.
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
ISG turns AI complexity into measurable execution advantage — from strategy and governance through to commercial models, workforce readiness and independent market intelligence.
Autonomous Enterprise
ISG helps organizations redesign operations for an autonomous future, defining where AI agents deliver the most value, restructuring workflows around them and building the accountability models that keep autonomous execution governed and auditable. As agentic AI moves from emerging capability to operational reality, the enterprises that win will be those that redesigned for it before it arrived.
Autonomy-Level Pricing
ISG's Autonomy-Level Pricing framework gives enterprises transparent, benchmarkable commercial structures that reflect how AI-enabled services are actually executed. By tagging each resource unit with the autonomy level used to deliver it, from human-validated to fully autonomous, ALP ensures that pricing evolves alongside capability and that both buyers and providers can quantify the value of advancing AI maturity.
AI & Software Intelligence
Drawing on the analysis of more than $2.6 billion in tracked AI spend through ISG Provider Lens and ISG Buyers Guide research, ISG gives procurement, technology and finance leaders the independent intelligence they need to make sharper build-versus-buy decisions, rationalize vendor portfolios and hold providers accountable to measurable outcomes.
AI Governance
ISG helps enterprises shift from compliance-as-constraint to governance-as-operating-model, embedding controls at the point of data creation, defining accountability for autonomous actions and building adaptive frameworks that keep pace with AI without slowing it down. Enterprises that get this right don't just manage risk. They build the trust that lets them scale faster.
AI Strategy
ISG grounds AI strategy in what is actually working, drawing on research across 1,200 enterprise use cases to align investment to where impact is most achievable. We help leadership teams design the data, talent and governance foundations that move AI from isolated pilots into the workflows that drive commercial results.
AI Maturity Index
The ISG AI Maturity Index delivers a scored, benchmarked assessment of AI readiness in 15 minutes, calibrated against peers across 75 countries and focused on the dimensions that determine whether AI investment translates into business results. Organizations receive dimensional analysis, gap identification and a personalized growth roadmap.
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 1,200 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 is exposing years of 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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