Earlier this year EY hosted more than 250 people from over 115 companies and 20 countries at the EY Global Workforce Conference in Rome. Over three days, TBR spoke with EY leaders such as Gerard Osei-Bonsu, Global People Advisory Services Tax leader; Maureen Flood, Global People Advisory Services Tax partner; and David Rooney, EY Germany partner, as well as human resources leaders from large and small companies and representatives from EY’s technology partners. The following includes details from the event as well as TBR’s ongoing analysis of EY, people advisory services, and consultancies.

Speed and trust anchor EY’s Mobility growth opportunity

Speed and trust equal momentum. From the opening presentation through every main-stage speech, panel discussion and breakout, EY leaders repeatedly came back to this formulation to reinforce the event’s core message: In an AI age, trust separates good from bad, success from failure, adoption from resistance. EY’s own research supports this formulation. The firm’s 2026 Mobility Reimagined Survey found that “high-trust mobility functions are 1.9 times more likely to report speed in deploying to new markets, 1.7 times more likely to report speed in policy decision-making, and 1.6 times more likely to get significantly positive ROI from their mobility investments.”
 
Gerard Osei-Bonsu, Global People Advisory Services Tax leader, described speed as quicker answers and faster decisions allowing changes at speed, although many companies remain more reactive than proactive. He said building trust requires strategic integration, operational effectiveness and satisfying employee experiences, all rooted in reliable data and technology. And critically, “speed without trust fails.”
 
Osei-Bonsu’s framing of speed and trust informed seemingly every other EY professional’s presentation and resonated with the clients TBR spoke with during the event (as well as EY’s leaders’ remarks during the firm’s Global Analyst Summit, which was also held in May). A few EY leaders and EY clients described a plethora of unreliable technologies and vendors in the Mobility and People Advisory Services space that are generating uncertainty around policies, risks and AI.
 
This counterpoint to EY’s trust narrative creates, in TBR’s view, an excellent environment for EY’s global workforce strategy, connecting mobility, payroll, immigration, rewards, workforce planning and technology, to continue growing. As the trusted adviser bringing speed, reliability and governance, the practice should experience ongoing revenue acceleration and remain among the strongest components of EY’s tax, audit and consulting portfolios.

Microsoft remains the technology backbone of EY’s Mobility strategy

Echoing last year’s event in Barcelona, Spain, EY’s strategic alliance with Microsoft permeated many of the presentations, use cases and discussions, with EY professionals reinforcing that the firm’s Mobility solutions are, almost exclusively, built on Microsoft’s platform. EY’s mobility, technology and industry expertise, orchestrated on Microsoft’s platform, provides EY’s clients with improved employee experiences across a range of mobility issues and journeys.
 
Critically, according to multiple EY partners, the firm’s tight alliance with Microsoft enables faster innovation of both EY’s proprietary solutions and Microsoft’s platform. A Microsoft leader attending the conference summed it up as “cocreated transformation, built-on experience and developed trust.” An EY leader noted that the firm delivers services around data and AI “at speed and with trust” baked in, lending EY “credibility, global scale and proven outcomes” that peers and competitors would struggle to replicate. Osei-Bonsu noted that “none of us have the blueprints” for everything, making technology alliances critical to EY’s success. He added that within the Mobility space a diverse set of players and ecosystem partners rely on EY and Microsoft to provide a kind of “centrifugal, gravitational” force powered by EY’s combination of workforce expertise, data, governance, technology and AI-enabled delivery.
 
In TBR’s write-up of the event last year, our assessment of Microsoft as EY’s most-strategic partner included a hedge that “EY noted expectations that other technology alliance partners, including ServiceNow, will become increasingly strategic to Mobility.” Discussions in Rome show Microsoft remains EY’s predominant technology alliance partner, perhaps even more so than a year ago, leading TBR to believe the EY-Microsoft partnership continues to underpin Mobility and provides a client-zero use case EY can share with clients as well as an example, within EY, of the advantages of partnering tightly and nearly exclusively with a technology provider like Microsoft.
 
TBR continues to see Mobility and People Advisory Services as catalysts for change within EY, further evidenced by Microsoft’s role in the Mobility practice. (Note: In May EY and Microsoft announced a $1 billion-plus, five-year initiative, including integrated EY teams and Microsoft forward-deployed engineers focused on scaling enterprise AI.)

EY brings CHROs deeper into M&A by connecting people, tax and technology

In an M&A-focused breakout session, Flood and EY colleagues discussed challenges around including talent management within a typical M&A process. Flood commented that human resources leaders often get left out of the loop during due diligence, potentially lowering the value of an acquisition (by increasing onboarding and assimilation expenses or failing to see red flags), echoing a sentiment TBR has heard from chief technology officers and IT directors lamenting the costs needed to fit an acquired assets technology into an existing environment.
 
On a positive note, Flood said the chief human resources officers (CHROs) at EY’s clients more frequently have a seat at the M&A table for workforce value creation and workforce integration, although typically only at companies already focused on changes to their people and organization, not just their tech. In TBR’s view, EY has a well-established brand around M&A and, notably, divestitures, and can leverage that experience and credibility to consult around the people aspects, not simply the technology and financials.
 
The firm’s HR Mobility Tax practice, for example, can play a more significant role in transaction evaluation and due diligence, provided EY’s clients fully appreciate the breadth of EY’s services beyond traditional M&A. In TBR’s view, greater adoption of AI by EY and the firm’s clients will, because of the transparency-enhancing nature of AI, accelerate broader consideration of human resources challenges and opportunities during M&A engagements, boost exposure and boost revenue for EY’s Mobility practice. CHROs will not make the final purchasing decisions, but EY will help them to increasingly be expected at the table.

Payroll software: EY’s Trojan horse for scaling IP

In a special session with TBR, Sheri Sullivan, Global Payroll Operate leader, and EY professionals discussed EY’s bet on developing a software platform designed to “demystify” payroll. Sullivan explained that humans frequently serve as the bottleneck in payroll processes, creating an opening for a trusted, auditable AI-enabled solution. With multiple trusted and accurate data sources, AI can generate useful payroll analysis and manage payroll systems.
 
As customer zero for the software, EY has been learning the limitations and seeing the benefits, all of which Sullivan and her team have begun to bring to clients. As of the Rome conference, EY’s client list for this AI-enabled product remains small, and the firm continues to test different commercial models, with the expectation scaling would begin in earnest before the end of 2026. In TBR’s view, even a relatively small client base and modest revenue stream from a payroll services platform could be significantly disruptive within the firm and the market.
 
While learning to perfect selling software from within a professional services firm, the payroll practice could be demonstrating to other parts of EY how to adopt, transform and monetize IP. TBR recognizes EY has been in the software-selling business for a couple of decades, but not at scale and not in the AI age. If that were to change, payroll services would be a likely catalyst. Across the broader market, every single company runs payroll. A trusted services provider, with a legacy brand around audit, tax, governance and risk, and enabled by proven AI, could displace smaller competitors, particularly among large clients that already work with EY. In short, TBR looks forward to hearing soon that EY’s global payroll services practice has become the firm’s fastest-growing revenue line.
 
One critical aspect of this event, as noted by TBR in previous years, has been EY’s near refusal to sell itself or ask attendees to explicitly describe their experiences and relationships with EY.
 
But EY did not present this capability as a customer-zero use case that clients could buy. Instead, EY partners stressed that the firm focused on Mobility as having evolved beyond logistics to include talent development, upskilling and adjusting the entire firm to new skills demands: Mobility within EY as part of improving the firm (and quietly conveying to clients “You could do this, too.”).

EY turns trust into an advantage in an uncertain workforce technology market

EY’s 2025 Barcelona message aged well, but in TBR’s view, mobility has progressed from being human-centric and tech-enabled to trust-dependent, AI-scaled and demonstrably business-critical. EY can increasingly combine employee experience, managed services, regulatory expertise, and its deepening alliance with Microsoft to demonstrate that trusted data and AI can deliver measurable outcomes in this space.

TBR walked away from the event with five themes:

1. The need to connect Mobility within a company to the company’s business overall echoed a decade-plus of consulting advice to CTOs and IT directors to be part of the business and not simply a cost center. EY has been hammering home the lessons learned from those technology consulting engagements and helping CHRO and tax executive clients become better internal business partners.
2. AI is a tool, not an answer. The week prior to the Rome conference, TBR attended EY’s Global Analyst Summit in New York and heard repeatedly that AI serves a purpose in an organization but cannot be the answer to every business problem, despite the relentless hype since the release of ChatGPT. As a firm, EY has a compelling and mature AI message.
3. Unreliable technology, too many vendors, and growing uncertainty in the Mobility and broader People Advisory Services space open tremendous opportunities for a trusted, proven Mobility provider, such as EY. And in Rome, it was not just EY leaders making the case but also clients. During one breakout session poll, only 47% of respondents said their technology platforms are “reliable.” The opening for EY is clear.
4. An EY software solution for payroll could significantly disrupt the payroll services market while helping EY overall become more adept at running a software practice within a professional services firm. TBR has seen some of EY’s peers fail at precisely that challenge, but EY’s leaders in this effort spoke knowingly about the mines scattered across the space while also bursting with passion for solving payroll problems with an EY software tool. Watch this space.
5. Immigration issues show no signs of abating in 2026 or beyond, providing more opportunities for EY to bring a mix of tax and consulting services to a growing number of clients. Several conference sessions highlighted immigration’s role in enabling access to talent, supporting workforce strategy and navigating future workforce challenges. As AI threatens to upend employment across a number of tech jobs typically associated with low-cost locations at the same time enterprises realize they lack much needed in-house AI talent, immigration challenges may morph in new ways, boosting demand for a trusted adviser.

EY remains ambitious about its revenue targets for People Advisory Services, and TBR’s assessment from 2025 still rings true: “Companies keep recruiting, hiring, paying, rewarding, moving, repatriating, retiring and hiring in an endless loop … [so] absent the worst possible global political and economic scenarios, including a drastic curtailment of global mobility, TBR believes that ambition is perhaps a bit too modest.”
 
Technology and macroeconomic trends favor EY’s Mobility practice. Perhaps just as significantly, so do trends across professional services, including AI adoption, business model disruption, commercial model shifts, and an all-around recognition that the largest consultancies need to change to meet clients’ changing demands and AI-enabled expectations. For the last three years, TBR has heard from both EY leaders and EY clients that the firm’s Mobility practice is already a catalyst for that change.

2026 Nokia Fixed Networks Industry Analyst Event, Yokohama, Japan, Sept. 15-17, 2026 — A select group of industry analysts gathered at The Westin in Yokohama, Japan, to hear from Nokia leaders, partners and customers about the company’s Fixed Networks business unit’s strategies, capabilities and opportunities. AI, hardware upgrades and the pivot toward hyperscaler opportunities were among the themes across the various executive presentations.

TBR perspective

The fixed networks market is at an inflection point, with three major technology transitions underway across access, Wi-Fi and network management. TR-069* (technical report 069) is evolving to TR-369 (technical report 369), the first major hardware refresh toward Wi-Fi 7 is underway, and the migration from GPON to XGS-PON, and selectively to 25G and 50G PON, is progressing as these technologies advance.
 
These shifts create a favorable window for Nokia to capture demand because hardware replacement is a logical time to pull through software modernization. Operators are simultaneously reconsidering how they manage the home, automate access networks and prepare fiber infrastructure for changing traffic patterns caused by AI adoption. Nokia is approaching this wave of progress with clearly defined road maps across relevant portfolio areas (e.g., Altiplano, Corteca, Quillion, PON) and is leveraging its hardware roots as the foundation for its AI story.
 
Nokia is positioning AI as another layer of value across its Fixed Networks portfolio, which spans access infrastructure, network control and home broadband. This approach is intentionally pragmatic, focused on applying AI where it can improve customer care, network operations, rollout efficiency and user experience. The strategy is less likely to produce a constant stream of attention-grabbing but relatively empty AI announcements. Instead, it gives Nokia a more credible path to converting AI from a feature into an operating model as customers become comfortable moving from AI-assisted workflows toward more autonomous operations.
 
Communication service providers (CSPs) remain the foundation of Nokia’s Fixed Networks customer base, but the company is increasingly applying PON economics and operational advantages to adjacent non-CSP environments, particularly hyperscalers. Out-of-band management (OOBM) is the clearest near-term example, with Nokia using co-creation and a highly configurable portfolio to establish credibility with hyperscalers before extending more standardized capabilities to neoscalers and others in the enterprise space.
 
In parallel, customer examples show that growth in the broader fixed networks market requires a variety of nuanced approaches. In some markets, Nokia can help customers modernize existing infrastructure, while in others, the opportunity depends on operators finding ways to make connectivity affordable and deployable for their customers through unconventional models.
 
Nokia is becoming more selective about the Fixed Networks opportunities it pursues, particularly in the hardware business, as it shifts away from deals where competitive pricing would push margins below targets. Rising component costs are also affecting customer purchasing decisions, constraining unit volumes or altering purchase timing. These factors resulted in top-line year-to-year declines for the Fixed Networks business in 2Q26.

Hyperscaler success first; neoscaler opportunity will build

Nokia is entering the hyperscaler space with PON capabilities for data center OOBM, using a co-creation approach and customer choice to establish itself in this market, leading with flexibility as its differentiator. The value proposition centers on characteristics that translate well from access networks into data centers, including density, space efficiency, lower cabling requirements, energy efficiency, and architectural flexibility. Nokia is also building choice into elements such as mount location, port count and interface mix, reflecting the highly customized demands of hyperscalers.
 
This opportunity is strategically meaningful as hyperscaler wins can provide a healthy financial complement and diversify the customer base, but CSPs will remain the core of the business. The more consequential long-term opportunity will be productizing what Nokia learns from hyperscaler engagements and carrying it into the broader data center market.
 
The flexibility Nokia is emphasizing for hyperscalers and neoscalers is well suited to these buyers, which have clearly defined architectural requirements. For many CSPs, excessive choice can create complexity when they look to Nokia for guidance on technology evolution, monetization and operations. As Nokia expands across customer types, its ability to package the right amount of flexibility for each segment will matter almost as much as the breadth of the portfolio itself.

AI road map emphasizes right-fit AI over AI-first positioning

Nokia is approaching AI from the broader customer-improvement perspective, layering capabilities within Altiplano and Corteca onto its existing hardware and software foundation to address operational pain points as customers modernize, leading with a platform-centric story. The road map spans two complementary domains, with Altiplano applying AI to network control, analysis and operations, and Corteca applying it to device management, customer care and the broadband experience.
 
Altiplano illustrates Nokia’s deliberate progression toward autonomy. Predictive AI and machine learning already support functions such as network analysis, capacity planning, churn reduction and KPI prediction. Agentic capabilities add a conversational interface and another set of virtual hands for network engineers. The longer-term direction moves toward AI completing complex end-to-end tasks under human supervision. Nokia characterized itself as between the human-in-the-loop and human-on-the-loop stages. This is an important distinction because it suggests the near-term objective is controlled operational augmentation, not unsupervised autonomy.
 
Nokia’s AI vision favors domain-grounded and deterministic approaches where possible, including smaller specialized models when they can provide better accuracy and token economics than larger general-purpose models. Model and deployment flexibility remain key to Nokia’s AI vision, enabling operators to use different models and combine cloud and on-premises inferences without requiring its users to conform to a single AI stack.
 
Corteca follows a similarly staged path in the home. Nokia is currently using AI to assist customer-care personnel, with the road map moving toward advanced analytics and quality-of-experience optimization. Home broadband challenges are not simply about faster Wi-Fi. Operators need visibility into what is occurring inside the home to manage Wi-Fi 7 experiences effectively, and the transition from TR-069 to TR-369 gives Nokia an opportunity to make Corteca a more central data and management layer as devices are refreshed, creating a natural opportunity to adopt modern software capabilities in kind.
 
For Corteca, this progression is about improving the broadband customer experience in a quantifiable way, such as net promoter score improvements, using greater visibility and AI-driven intelligence to help operators identify customers experiencing service issues faster and determine the appropriate action before those problems translate into customer dissatisfaction.
 
Taken together, Nokia’s approach to AI is appropriately conservative for a network domain where reliability and trust matter. The company seeks to make AI consumable, measurable and progressively more autonomous without separating it from the underlying network expertise. The risk is that a measured road map can appear less differentiated because, while AI has become pervasive in competitors’ fixed networks messaging, the level of substance behind that messaging varies considerably, with some announcements still emphasizing broad AI visions without clearly defining deployment maturity or measurable outcomes.
 
Nokia’s AI road map asserts that domain expertise, trustworthy data and deterministic execution will ultimately matter more than model size or the volume and frequency of AI messaging. Nokia also touts gradual operational evolution, with defined use cases to substantiate its AI vision.

Customer examples highlight need for creativity to expand the fixed networks market

Many of Nokia’s core fixed network markets are mature from a regional perspective, meaning growth from existing customers increasingly depends on upgrades, share shifts and expansion into adjacent use cases. The event’s customer examples reinforced that there is no universal path to additional fixed networks growth. In highly saturated markets, customers are selectively modernizing where fiber creates incremental value. Elsewhere, the central challenge is not technology performance but whether operators can make broadband economically accessible to households that remain unconnected.
 
Developing markets require a different kind of creativity. Customer discussions related to emerging markets highlighted affordability, geography, payment behavior and infrastructure resilience as constraints that hardware modernization cannot solve alone. Operators are experimenting with prepaid broadband, short billing periods, rapid fulfillment, alternative distribution and localized network designs to expand the potential customer base by designing the service around how people actually live, earn and pay.
 
Country- and city-specific variables such as weather, housing, population density, affordability and existing infrastructure determine whether the business case works. Nokia’s opportunity is therefore not only to provide more capable access technology, but to help operators combine technology, deployment architecture and business models in ways that make connectivity viable in places where a conventional fixed-broadband model may not. Multi-PON flexibility lets operators delay or stage technology choices, Corteca and Altiplano can improve the economics of operating and supporting networks, and automation can reduce the human effort required for deployment and assurance. The common thread is flexibility.

Conclusion

Nokia’s Fixed Networks strategy is increasingly defined by disciplined expansion. The company is using simultaneous technology transitions of access, Wi-Fi and network management to deepen its position with CSPs, applying PON expertise to hyperscaler and neoscaler data centers, and building AI into Altiplano and Corteca through a staged path toward greater autonomy. Across each initiative, the consistent message is flexibility. Multiple PON generations, multiple AI models and deployment options, and different architectures for different customer economics all reinforce this message.
 
Hyperscalers can absorb customization, neoscalers can standardize it, CSPs often need a more prescriptive road map, and emerging-market operators may need entirely new commercial models to make connectivity viable in their footprints. The next phase of Nokia’s Fixed Networks growth will therefore depend as much on understanding how each customer creates value as it does on advancing the underlying technology itself.