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Consumer Goods

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Top Story

Everything Depends on Network Transformation

What is your customers’ journey like, and can you optimize it? As you seek to design interactive digital customer and employee experiences, whether through connected devices, new applications, automation technologies, enhanced security controls or moving to the cloud, your need for improved performance, monitoring and security will grow significantly. To stay cost efficient, you need to transform your network to support the new requirements of digital transformation. Want to learn how?

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Rise of the Digital Consumer: Are you Ready?

Are you looking at digital solutions such as direct-to-consumer ecommerce, internet of things, connected smart homes, demand-driven supply chains, or innovation via customer collaboration?

ISG has performed hundreds of engagements for consumer goods companies across the globe. From your procurement to your network, software, next-gen sourcing and benchmarking needs, ISG brings deep industry, market and advisory insights and solutions to help you achieve your strategic goals.

Your Employees Need Flexibility

Optimize employee experience and technology adoption and ROI. ISG can help you provide the security, strategy, flexibility and tools for your employees to adapt to new ways of working, collaborate and increase productivity. 

Your Customers Demand Digital

Reimagine your online retail channel with us. We’ll help you leverage data and intelligent automation in your supply chain, forecasting and back office, and adopt digital solutions to optimize your processes and reach your consumers directly. 

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.

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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
  • Business outcomes are lagging AI ambition
    Enterprises 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?
  • Data infrastructure is exposing years of deferred investment
    Al 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.
  • The barrier to scale is organizational, not technical
    Organizational 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.
  • Agentic AI is outpacing governance
    As 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.

Client Stories

“Classic SAP” to S/4HANA: Saving a Sunk Investment

Jun 24, 2021, 13:50
ISG assists a major retail and television company in effectively leveraging its sunk investment in SAP ERP central component (ECC) to achieve $76 million in S/4 HANA savings.
Title : “Classic SAP” to S/4HANA: Saving a Sunk Investment
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A major retail and television company engaged ISG to help it in creating and executing on an SAP negotiating strategy. It wanted ISG’s help to execute on its digital transformation roadmap in 6 weeks. To support this effort, ISG deployed a team of SAP licensing and technical and audit advisors to work with the company’s various stakeholders. Together, we worked to create a negotiating strategy based on the following factors:

  • The company’s business and transformation objectives, and its license entitlement and compliance position based on its existing estate of SAP packages and engines;
  • ISG’s view of license mix optimization opportunities;
  • Conversion credits based on ISG’s mapping of ECC to S/4HANA equivalents;
  • Digital access exposure; and
  • ISG market benchmarks and ISG domain expertise in SAP S/4HANA contracting and pricing policies.

ISG strategically leveraged our reputation as a “deal advocate” to achieve the following deal attributes:

  • Pricing: ISG advised on pricing based on the company’s invest and run costs, our deep market data, conversion credits, reduced maintenance rates, phase-in of maintenance and software-as-a-service (SaaS) subscription fees.
  • Contract Flexibility: We secured value flexibility on the on-premise engines and step-in on the cloud products.
  • Risk Mitigation: ISG helped it suspend compliance audits, conform digital access based on its business model, and expand territory restrictions and affiliate use.
  • Partnership: We obtained an upfront SAP investment to ensure a successful transition from ECC to S/4HANA.

The company received a market-leading agreement to achieve each of its cost and risk mitigation goals. Under the agreement, it realized the following benefits:

  • Savings of $76 million; to achieve these savings, ISG:
    • Achieved a 94% discount on on-premise solutions and a 60% discount on cloud solutions,
    • Secured free MaxAttention for 2 years,
    • Reduced maintenance costs by transitioning from enterprise support to product support for large enterprises (PSLE),
    • Negotiated step-in on cloud engines and packages based on its deployment schedule,
    • Secured conversion credits based on the full value of the company’s ECC to S/4HANA equivalents, and 
    • Negotiated a single-use metric to address digital access license requirements;
  • Maintenance and audit holiday of 2 years; and
  • Flexibility to manage its SAP estate for a period of 3 years before crystallization of the environment.
Categories :
  • Consumer Packaged Goods
  • Retail
  • Software Advisory Services
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  • case study
retail software sap
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