Index Insider: The State of BPO in 2026
Enterprise demand for BPO services remains solid, but the environment is only getting more challenging for service providers as AI expectations rise and competitive pressure mounts.
Transform and optimize your business operations to drive measurable business value, agility and resilience.
Across industries, the pace of change has never been faster. Organizations are navigating a perfect storm of economic volatility, technological disruption and rising customer expectations, forcing leaders to rethink how work gets done.
Enterprise-wide digitalization is accelerating.
A majority of global enterprises are now integrating AI, automation and analytics directly into their business-process transformation roadmaps to achieve measurable productivity and agility gains.
Platform-based ecosystems are replacing siloed systems.
Aligned with this finding, we are seeing an increasingly strong shift toward cloud-native, composable architectures for business support functions.
The next frontier is intelligent, outcome-based operations where human insight and digital intelligence converge to deliver agility, transparency and measurable business value.
Amid this transformation, the differentiator between those who merely adapt and those who lead are the ability to turn business support to business value.
We help organizations to leverage AI innovation to redesign and optimize operations, delivering measurable business outcomes. Combining our deep industry expertise, data-driven insights and proven advisory methodologies, we partner with clients to reimagine their operating models, aligning people, processes and technology to achieve agility, efficiency and growth.
We help you go beyond incremental improvement to achieve impactful transformation that lasts.
ISG’s advisory spans the full transformation lifecycle, strengthened by our independent perspective, market insights and proven results:
Identify performance gaps and improvement opportunities through comparative analytics, using ISG’s proprietary benchmarks for actionable insights.
Build an agile, scalable, digital-first operating model aligned with business outcomes, informed by ISG’s market intelligence.
Integrate AI, intelligent automation and advanced analytics to enable data-backed decisions and accelerate innovation.
Foster a performance-driven culture with ongoing optimization and governance for sustained success.
Change Management & Workforce Readiness
Prepare and enable teams to embrace new processes and technologies for lasting, successful adoption, ensuring ROI targets for your tech investments are met.
Apply ISG’s FutureSource™ methodology, AI-enabled platform, IP templates and expertise to make evidence-based and future-ready sourcing decisions.
Design, build, and optimize GCCs and GBS as strategic enablers of transformation, leveraging global talent, automation and analytics to deliver scalability, innovation and measurable business value.
20–40% process efficiency improvement
25% reduction in operating costs
Accelerated adoption of automation and AI
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
ISG is a leader in proprietary research, advisory consulting and executive event services focused on market trends and disruptive technologies.
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Learn MoreThere is a familiar refrain echoing across boardrooms and pipeline reviews that the channel is underperforming, that partners are not delivering and that ecosystems are noisy and inefficient and somehow past their prime. The implication is that something fundamental has broken. That conclusion is convenient, but it is wrong. The channel is not broken. What is broken is how most organizations design, enable and experience their partners. The failure is not structural. It is experiential.
For decades, organizations have treated sales incentive compensation as a separate entity, isolated from the broader total rewards strategy. This isolation stems from historical operations, where sales compensation is designed and managed within Sales, with periodic budget oversight from Finance, while HR focuses on base pay, benefits and equity. Unfortunately, this siloed approach, further reinforced by outdated technology and entrenched business practices, limits companies from fully leveraging their total rewards strategy. As a result, I predict that by 2028, many companies will find their compensation processes ineffective, prompting a critical assessment of their alignment with desired priorities and values.
With evolving buyers’ needs, finance and accounting outsourcing (FAO) services are maturing. With rising buyer expectations, engagements are evolving from a transactional type to a strategic function. Check out ISG's unique archetype report to understand market trends and buyer archetypes.
Enterprises have begun reimagining the customer, employee and supplier journeys. They are choosing continuous design thinking, agile, lean and DevOps methodologies over the traditional waterfall approach. Read more to inform your sourcing decisions.
This IPL report has been developed to provide research-based, objective insights into business process outsourcing (BPO) and transformation service providers for enterprise procurement leaders and users. Leading providers have a strategic mindset and a roadmap that combines BPO with ongoing transformation. Click for more details.