Industries

Private Equity and Mergers & Acquisitions

Value creation is your mission and focus.

We’ll help you execute quickly on cost optimization and identify opportunities to drive longer-term value through technology transformation.

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Top Story

Agentic AI Is Redesigning Work Faster Than You Realize

Enterprises need to redesign themselves so they can operate safely, coherently and competitively in a world where execution itself is partially autonomous.

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Accelerate Growth & Optimize Costs

You may have limited internal resources and rely on trusted partners to drive operational improvements. How can you choose the right technology strategies while reducing and managing IT costs?

For over 15 years, ISG has partnered with leading private equity firms to provide pre-close IT due diligence and post-close IT optimization and sourcing strategies. We have delivered nearly a billion dollars in cost savings to our client’s portfolio companies.

Leveraging market-leading insights and deep industry experience in healthcare, life sciences, finance and banking, technology, retail, manufacturing, travel and transportation, ISG can help you accomplish:

  • IT cost optimization in areas such as networks, software and automation
  • M&A and carve-out activities, including operating model strategy and organizational design 
  • Digital transformation, including technology use cases, benchmarking, and organizational change management

Assess your Cost Optimization Potential

How do you optimize costs while also maturing your business and preparing for the future? Improve valuations by reducing operational costs – particularly in the first 100 days after an acquisition. 

How does your IT spend stack up against the market?

Our Clients

KKR Blackstone Cerberus Hellman-Friedman Vista-Equity-Partners

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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
  • 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 exposing 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.

Meet our team