The Hackett Group^®
Orchestrating Enterprise Transformation

The Hackett Group^® is a strategic consulting and executive advisory firm specializing in digital transformation and Gen AI to help organizations achieve Digital World Class^® performance. Grounded in industry benchmarks and proven best practices, it helps organizations architect and accelerate performance improvements where they matter most.

For nearly 30 years, The Hackett Group^® has guided Global 1000 companies through enterprise transformations using proprietary benchmarking insights. But in the past two years, the game has changed. The rise of generative AI is forcing companies to fundamentally rethink their IT strategies and investment priorities.

While many competitors are still finding their footing, The Hackett Group^® has moved aggressively, investing heavily in breakthrough technology and top-tier talent to lead the Gen AI revolution from the front.

Central to this are AI XPLR^™, a market-leading Gen AI ideation and evaluation platform developed in-house, and ZBrain^™, an intelligent orchestration platform acquired through The Hackett Group’s acquisition of LeewayHertz.

Spearheading this innovation are Ted Fernandez, The Hackett Group^® CEO, and Akash Takyar, a Gen AI pioneer and CEO of LeewayHertz. Takyar leads technical delivery with a team of advanced engineers, and their combined strengths in strategy and execution fuel The Hackett Group’s end-to-end approach to generative AI transformation.

“Our suite of Gen AI services and technology is designed to meet clients where they are, offering a seamless journey from strategic planning to the realization of Gen AI-driven transformation,” says Fernandez.

Whether it’s optimizing finance, procurement, supply chain, HR or IT, The Hackett Group^® delivers an enterprise-wide roadmap for operational excellence that is visionary and pragmatic.

Guiding AI Transformation from Ideation to Execution

The Hackett Group^® is uniquely positioned to close the gap between strategy and execution through a dual engagement model.

The combination of AI XPLR^™ and ZBrain^™ fills a critical market gap—offering the only fully integrated, data-driven solution that helps enterprises scale Gen AI from idea to impact

Its Gen AI consulting and Executive Advisory services deliver end-to-end support to help enterprises move from AI exploration to execution with clarity, speed, and strategic alignment.

Leveraging its integrated Gen AI suite, clients can identify high-impact opportunities, assess feasibility, and deploy AI responsibly across functions. At its core, AI XPLR^™ uncovers inefficiencies, and pinpoints areas for AI-driven improvement. With version 4.0, the platform now goes beyond evaluation to generate complete AI solutions—including feasibility assessments, agentic workflows, data source discovery, and embedded solution analysis—transforming opportunity into implementation-ready design. The platform also identifies capabilities already embedded within existing enterprise systems, helping organizations realize value from their existing technology stack. Acting as a catalyst for performance across departments, AI XPLR^™ enables organizations to model outcomes, quantify the impact of change, mitigate risk, and realize faster time-to-value.

Once Gen AI opportunities are identified, ZBrain^™, a full stack, low code AI agent orchestration engine, empowers teams to rapidly design, test, and deploy without complex coding. It supports bi directional agent-to-agent communication via a centralized agent store of domain specific, pre built agents for customer support, billing, compliance, IT, and more. ZBrain^™ ingests multi source enterprise data into a vector and ontology backed private knowledge base, enabling fast semantic retrieval with scalable vector stores. Its smart orchestration engine executes business logic across real time, streaming, or batch workflows, while governance is maintained via a centralized prompt manager, guardrails, audit logs, and RBAC for compliance and explainability. Native support for RLHF ensures continuous improvement of agent performance, and the platform remains model and cloud agnostic, seamlessly integrating LLMs across all major public, private, hybrid, or on premesis deployments.

A standout example of The Hackett Group’s impact is its ongoing work with a global warehousing and logistics leader. Facing customer churn, compliance gaps and operational inefficiencies, the client aimed at reimagining its business across ERP, EPM, HCM and more through AI.

The Hackett Group^® executed a structured four-phase transformation strategy. It successfully identified and processed more than 415 Gen AI use cases, implemented 80 embedded AI solutions and built six native applications using theZBrain^™ orchestration platform. These initiatives have already delivered measurable impact across revenue assurance, customer engagement, labor productivity and energy efficiency.

“Our suite of Gen AI services and technology is designed to meet clients where they are, offering a seamless journey from strategic planning to the realization of Gen AI-driven transformation”

Alongside LeewayHertz, The Hackett Group^® acquired Spend Matters, a procurement and supply chain market intelligence platform that will boost AI XPLR^™ with exclusive vendor data and supply chain insights.

“The combination of AI XPLR^™ and ZBrain^™ fills a critical market gap—offering the only fully integrated, data-driven solution that helps enterprises scale Gen AI from idea to impact,” said Takyar. “This alliance has the power to reshape the approach to large-scale AI deployment.”

Blending best-in-class consulting, proprietary benchmarking and performance data and next-gen platforms, The Hackett Group^® charts a bold course to operational excellence, guiding organizations toward success.