Connect, grow, deliver

TBR spent two days in Atlanta, listening to and speaking with Sage’s management team as part of the company’s annual Analyst Summit, and we walked away impressed. This is a company that knows itself and its strengths. It knows where it needs to improve. It knows where the pain points and constraints are, and has always done a good job of navigating between the two.

Most importantly, the company knows its customers, which should come as no surprise considering how long Sage has been serving its SMB install base. Sage has leveraged these strengths and established a large, sticky install base from which to pursue opportunities adjacent to its core business.

Sage is focused on three interlocking areas — connect, grow, deliver — which President Dan Miller described during the event:

• Connect through trusted partner networks
• Grow by winning new logos through a verticalized suite motion
• Deliver real, measurable productivity using AI

Each pillar represents a separate part of the company’s go-to-market strategy, but Grow stands out as the most vital to the company’s growth trajectory. Landing and expanding with new logos is the company’s greatest source of revenue growth, with vertical-specific and business operations solutions offering some of the greatest upsell potential. Aligned with this strategy, the company is a disciplined but active acquirer, onboarding new IP to enhance these sales motions.

Long-term, AI presents opportunities for the company to upsell into its finance and accounting (F&A) core. As Sage leans into its strengths while building for the future, its ability to scale AI and industry depth across a known and trusted customer base may prove to be the company’s most valuable asset.

Landing with F&A, then expanding with payroll, HR and operations management

Sage’s land-and-expand strategy starts with a stronghold in finance and builds outward through operational adjacencies. Most customers enter through core accounting —typically via Intacct — and expand into areas like payroll, HR, and inventory or distribution management as their needs mature. Vertical-specific modules are critical to this motion, especially in midmarket industries where Sage can tailor functionality to operational nuances.

The company reinforces expansion by packaging these capabilities into suites, streamlining procurement and positioning itself as more than just a financial system. Sales teams are trained to identify expansion triggers early; signs like API adoption, workflow customization or manual process bottlenecks often indicate opportunities. Although the company’s product maturity varies across the portfolio, Sage has seen success in service- and product-centric verticals, enabling the company to upsell and cross-sell. This approach, combined with a focus on ease of integration and strong partner involvement, is helping Sage grow account value without overpromising in its product road map.

AI at Sage: Workflow-first, ROI-driven

Sage management spent much time discussing its ambitions in AI. From TBR’s perspective, the tone was very grounded. Although the company will never be at the cutting edge of AI innovation, management did a great job of articulating the current opportunities to upsell AI capabilities. Finance and accounting workflows offer many sales opportunities for Sage to pursue, and the company is investing in R&D to capitalize on them. Similar to many of its application peers, Sage intends to approach agentic AI and generative AI development on a use-case-by-use-case basis. In Sage’s case, this is even more prudent as SMB customers face greater budgetary restrictions and require ROI to be realized in the first year.

Sage management highlighted AP automation, time-saving prompts and variance analysis as key areas where the company is achieving success with AI-powered automation. Like several peers, the company’s Copilot solution serves as the unified user interface (UI) for engaging embedded AI tools. Long-term, management expects to see this UI become more adaptive, guiding the user through an automated workflow. Guided prompting was another area of focus, and the company is building a library of prompts for end users to leverage as they perform specific tasks. Under the hood, the company intends to run its AI tools on internally trained models built on top of a third-party. CTO Aaron Harris discussed two of these tools: Sage Accounting LLM and APDoc2Vec.

As a reminder, Sage partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) over a year ago to collaborate on F&A models, and management highlighted the continued effort to build a new multitenant, dependency-based stack.

Long-term, TBR expects this work to be pivotal in reducing the cost of running AI workloads, while internally developed models with lower parameter counts than big-name large language models (LLMs) will further enhance cost efficiency at inference. Meanwhile, Sage is still figuring out how to monetize AI, but the industry default is to implement a tiered system. Some high-compute copilots may eventually carry usage-based fees, especially in forecasting, but for now, the priority is to show clear value and price accordingly.

In 2025 no conversation is complete without recognizing the platform implications of agentic workflows. Behind the scenes, Sage is preparing for an agent-first architecture by integrating emerging frameworks, such as Model Context Protocol (MCP) or Agent 2 Agent (A2A), directly into its platforms. The long-term goal is to coordinate these through super agents and plug into the broader agent ecosystem (Salesforce, Microsoft, Google), but this is still only part of the long-term road map.

That said, the company is building for the future, with an emphasis on data model consistency, dependency-based deployment, and orchestration layers capable of managing multi-agent chains. This is all being done with AWS in the background, keeping the platform anchored at the infrastructure layer.

Sage deepens its partner relationships

Sage’s partner and go-to-market strategy is built for focus and leverage. The company cannot cover every vertical or service need on its own, so partners are central to how it sells, delivers and scales. The revamped Sage Partner Network is tighter, with clear roles across sell, build and serve motions, and expectations tied to growth, not just activity. Multiyear vertical plans, coinvestment and execution discipline are now baseline requirements.

Internally, the GTM engine runs through SIGMA, which ties product planning to what the direct and partner channels sell. Sales teams are trained to package suites, identify expansion triggers, and position the platform by vertical need, rather than a feature checklist. To prepare for the platform’s evolution, Sage is already laying the groundwork for a more extensible ecosystem, including plans for an agent marketplace that would give partners a direct path into the next wave of product delivery.

Staying the course and preparing for what lies ahead

Sage’s story at its annual Analyst Summit was not necessarily one of reinvention. Land and expand has been the company’s strategy for years, and it has worked well so far. By anchoring in finance, expanding through vertical suites and operation management, and keeping partners close to the motion, Sage is executing with clarity around who it serves and how it wins. Meanwhile, the platform is evolving, AI is taking shape, and the architecture is catching up to the ambition. None of the company’s claims felt like overpromising.

In a market filled with transformation stories, Sage is running a disciplined play. The question is whether it can maintain that discipline as it scales and converts its product investments, especially in AI and agentic workflows, into tangible value for the customers it already knows best.

From May 20 to 21, 2026, in Dallas, Hitachi Digital Services hosted close to 100 analysts and advisers for a two-day summit featuring Hitachi leaders, clients and technology partners. The following reflects TBR’s observations from the event, informal conversations with Hitachi leaders and clients, and TBR’s ongoing analysis of the overall IT services and professional services space.

Hitachi Digital Services perfectly positioned to take advantage of IT-OT convergence and AI adoption

Two tectonic technology shifts happening now and opening massive revenue opportunities play straight into Hitachi’s strengths, positioning Hitachi Digital Services for significant growth over the next five years. With IT and OT convergence accelerating and enterprises increasingly adopting AI at scale, Hitachi Digital Services can rely on Hitachi’s engineering DNA, deep expertise in specific industries, and firsthand experience in manufacturing as the foundation for a build-integrate-operate value proposition. The analysts and advisers event highlighted how well Hitachi Digital Services brings the entire Hitachi company to its clients, remains rooted in Hitachi’s engineering approach to everything, and maintains its focus on strategic priorities, even as the market shifts all around them.

Although smaller than the typical IT and professional services firms covered by TBR, Hitachi Digital Services warrants close attention in the coming years. Its distinctive business model, strategic direction and performance — particularly its combination of IT, OT, AI and domain expertise — position Hitachi Digital Services as a potential outlier in the IT services landscape.

Hitachi’s broader capabilities and assets help Hitachi Digital Services deliver unique combination of IT, OT and AI

Though only a two-day event, Hitachi included an impressive breadth of client speakers and panel participants, all from Hitachi Digital Services’ core industries, while also bringing technology partners into the discussion, occasionally simultaneously. One major telecom player described their relationship with Hitachi Digital Services as a client and with Hitachi overall as a go-to-market technology partner. An automotive client praised Hitachi Digital Services’ ability to “make our problems their problems to solve” and called out Hitachi’s “asset knowledge,” which blended IT capabilities with OT experience.

During onstage presentations and informal discussions with TBR, clients noted the importance of Hitachi Digital Services’ ability to seamlessly tap into the larger Hitachi organization and bring deeply technical engineering expertise to bear. Not surprisingly, clients attending the event also noted their well-established relationships with Hitachi, reinforcing Hitachi Digital Services’ messages around sustained focus on clients’ evolving issues. TBR’s assessment of Hitachi Digital Services’ client service value proposition and technology partner alliance strategy could be best summed up by a comment from a cloud vendor on stage with Hitachi Digital Services: “showing up together with Hitachi, delivering results, day after day.”

On Day 1 of the summit, a senior Hitachi Digital Services executive said the company maintained an “R&D and engineering first, consulting second mindset,” a sentiment echoed throughout the event. Another executive noted that innovation “starts with Hitachi engineering R&D.” Discussions around IT-OT convergence and Industry 5.0 included elements of consulting but remained rooted in engineering. For example, when discussing IT and OT convergence, Hitachi leaders described the company’s state-of-the-art railcar manufacturing plant in Maryland, a real, physical, operational test bed for digital innovations and Hitachi Digital Services’ IT + OT + AI value proposition. For Industry 5.0, Hitachi executives discussed Hitachi Digital Services’ overall AI strategy and noted the confluence of human and AI collaboration aided by AI agents.

In TBR’s view, the consistent undercurrent of engineering and R&D separates Hitachi Digital Services from peers in the IT services and consulting space, in part because of the credibility behind Hitachi’s “engineering first” assertion. Any company can say it has engineering capabilities; Hitachi builds railcars.

Domain expertise and organizational intelligence needed for broader AI adoption and agentic AI

Regarding AI, leaders at Hitachi Digital Services emphasized that effective AI begins with deep knowledge. Hitachi brings a strong foundation in business, operations, design, manufacturing and maintenance — an extensive base of expertise that it leverages to power its AI initiatives. In short, Hitachi Digital Services professionals argued they have more robust intelligence to feed into AI models and algorithms than most peers. Hitachi leaders also highlighted the company’s focus on organizational intelligence and its long-standing capabilities around “capturing the intelligence of complex organizations.”

In TBR’s view, Hitachi’s only complex organization likely provides a useful starting point for understanding the applicability of AI in organizational intelligence. Regarding agentic AI, Hitachi Digital Services leaders said AI agents must be specific to a domain, such as industrial AI, engineering AI or cybersecurity AI — an assertion that plays to Hitachi’s strengths. They also expect agentic AI adoption will accelerate in 2026, particularly around process and application modernization. One Hitachi Digital Services leader anticipated a shift from “minimum viable product” to “minimum viable agent,” a neat turn of phrase that might indicate both a shift toward a more consulting-focused mindset and internal pressures to deploy more AI-enabled assets. TBR notes that every one of Hitachi Digital Services’ competitors is working through those same shifts.

Mission-critical IT + OT + AI

In TBR’s view, Hitachi Digital Services’ ability to lean on the broader Hitachi company’s engineering expertise and real-world physical assets provides Hitachi Digital Services with clear separation from peers in the IT services space. If Hitachi Digital Services can deliver results in mission-critical — and constantly moving — settings, such as railway operations, clients in less dynamic environments can be assured of its capabilities.

Hitachi leaders noted shifts in the broader IT and OT spaces, such as the greater attention being paid to cybersecurity risks in OT and CFOs being generally more aware of the costs of funding fully separate IT and OT systems, which TBR believes may accelerate IT-OT convergence. Complemented by AI and infused with domain expertise, Hitachi Digital Services, in TBR’s view, should maintain a clearly differentiated position within the digital transformation and IT services space.

As a potential partner for large ISVs and cloud hyperscalers, Hitachi Digital Services’ combination of IT, OT and AI capabilities provides easily understandable differentiation. For large enterprises in Hitachi Digital Services’ target industries, Hitachi’s track record in mission-critical environments and the company’s sustained R&D and innovation create a compelling value proposition.

TBR will be more closely tracking Hitachi Digital Services’ evolution, particularly as IT-OT convergence accelerates and Hitachi Digital Services’ role in the broader ecosystem grows.

On April 15 and 16, PwC Japan hosted over 20 analysts, a partner and PwC executives for a day and a half summit at the company’s Technology Laboratory in Tokyo. Chief Strategy Officer and Chief Innovation Officer Kenji Katsura set the tone when opening the meeting by explaining that over the course of the event attendees would be hearing from leaders across PwC’s businesses — including audit, tax, deals and consulting — highlighting the importance of PwC’s strategy to deliver the full range of the firm’s expertise to clients. While ensuring that PwC’s services remain highly relevant to clients in Japan, the firm’s GTM strategy is closely aligned with its global network. This alignment allows PwC Japan to leverage the best practices and innovations from across the network while also contributing homegrown insights and advancements that can benefit clients worldwide.

The event included demos, presentations and one-on-one breakouts that allowed analysts to gain firsthand knowledge of PwC Japan’s evolving strategy. Demonstrating culture and an understanding of local business dynamics still provides an important nuance that allows PwC to elevate the value of its services, especially in the current uncertain geopolitical environment, as having highly country-specific capabilities and dedicated staff may become a greater asset than more explicitly globalized organizations. The following write-up summarizes TBR’s takeaways from the event and provides a glimpse into what we believe will set the next chapter of PwC’s business.

As a node in PwC’s ever-expanding ecosystem, Technology Laboratory brings art and science together through physical assets

Starting with a hands-on demo led by Technology Laboratory lead Shinichiro Sanji, PwC’s Technology Laboratory team demonstrated the pivot the firm has begun making in its interactions with clients, where the outcome of workshops has evolved beyond the art of the possible and into tangible solutions backed by the use of physical assets. Responsible for PwC’s tech-driven go-to-market strategy, which builds a business pipeline through cross-industry collaboration, Technology Laboratory in Tokyo is a first of its kind and enables the firm to demonstrate how it can interlink buyers beyond the traditional IT and/or finance functions into operational technology.

The cocreation of assets with commercial and public clients as well as academia will also help PwC demonstrate understanding and connectivity of physical AI and revamp industries where industrialized robotics are heavily in use. The Experience Center also remains an integral part of the Technology Laboratory’s success as creating future scenarios based on market and industry trends necessitates market insights delivered through multidisciplinary skills teams. With the Technology Laboratory and Experience Center housed adjacent to each other, it streamlines collaboration and interaction between teams when needed, while maintaining enough separation to enhance the unique value each team contributes during client workshops.

Meanwhile, as PwC strengthens its local relationships, it also continues to build nodes across its member firms that demonstrate an appetite for innovation and support client needs. For example, the firm recently announced the opening of the OT Cyber Lab in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the expansion of PwC’s Reinvention Lab in Australia, where it added hands-on capabilities for clients to test out advanced technologies.

We see PwC’s Business Experience Technology (BXT) and Business Model Reinvention (BMR) frameworks as the connecting glue between the various labs across PwC member firms, especially as the BXT raised the bar high for the firm’s consultants to drive outcomes. Now BMR provides a structured approach for the labs to have guided conversations with clients around their functional technology needs.

Maintaining continuity in executing against strategic priorities brings PwC closer, one member firm at a time

Following the Technology Laboratory demo, Masataka Kubota, Chair and Territory Senior Partner, PwC Japan Group CEO, kicked off the event by setting a high-level agenda centered on five megatrends: Climate Change, Tech Disruption, Demographic Shift, Fracturing World and Social Instability. These themes guided PwC’s presentations across its Assurance, Tax, Advisory and Consulting practices, with each area exploring or delving deeper into these trends.

PwC executives’ emphasis on reinforcing the alignment of PwC Japan and PwC Global strategies around BMR, trust, sustainability, and AI and data closely resonated with what TBR heard in a pair of similar events in the fall of 2024 in EMEA and the U.S. Kubota further amplified PwC member firms’ efforts around unity. PwC Japan’s regional customization and diversity remain vital to the firm’s success, especially as local clients lean on the company’s expertise and guidance to navigate choppy international market conditions.

Masaki Yasui, PwC Japan Group’s Consulting leader, continued the discussion, providing an update and insights into the firm’s line of business. Doubling in size in terms of people since late 2018, PwC Japan’s Consulting practice now houses 5,130 of the firm’s more than 12,700 employees in Japan and has grown at a double-digit rate for around 10 years — a pace that is expected to be sustained through 2030, according to Yasui. This will be an impressive achievement for PwC Japan’s consulting business, given the macroeconomic headwinds and impact on discretionary spending and consequently on consulting opportunities.

According to TBR’s management consulting research, consulting revenue experienced a deceleration in 2024 of 3.1% year-to-year, down from 8.1% in 2023, a trend we expect to continue throughout 2025.

Deploying tech-enabled arbitrage model will test PwC’s readiness to transform its professional services model, with consulting being most ripe for it

Leaning on the firm’s ongoing success rooted in its client-centric approach, focus on priority accounts, portfolio expansion and investment in growth areas provided a strong foundation for PwC Japan’s consulting growth. While these efforts are not unique to PwC, we believe what has helped the firm thus far is its collaborative culture across lines of business, making it appealing for partners to be part of. Growth will likely come from PwC Japan investing in new services to meet demand with BMR, strengthening its digital core, and front-office transformation serving as the lead in parts of the clients’ discussions.

Meanwhile, focusing on multinational clients while tapping into the power of PwC Japan’s Business Network will help the firm bridge opportunities with global clients in and outside Japan, further amplifying the need for better member firm collaboration. PwC Japan recognizes the evolving professional service market dynamics and has built out a new three-layer model for sustainable growth, with the key separation between the first and second layers being less human-dependent. Executing on the second and third layers, which are largely focused on accounting for changes in staffing and commercial models enabled through data intelligence and data monetization, will once again test PwC Japan’s collaborative culture, as often such initiatives are more challenging to be sold and managed internally than to bring externally with clients.

Many professional services companies grapple with similar challenges largely because of the time and materials (T&M) commercial model that consulting companies typically employ for such services. Developing data monetization and a fee-for-service type of model essentially requires companies like PwC to depart from the T&M model. We believe PwC Japan is one step ahead of many of its competitors in that regard as its consulting business has largely been driven by fixed-price engagements, making it easier to bridge into the fee-for-service setup it is looking to pursue as part of its layers two and three strategies.

The challenge for PwC Japan will be to educate other member firms on how to approach the opportunities, as elsewhere T&M remains the predominant commercial model. Further, PwC Japan, just like other member firms, sees managed services as part of its ability to continue to grow its business. While it is still a small portion of the current revenue composition (about 4% to 6% at the global level, according to TBR estimates), the firm continues to explore avenues to augment that gap, with leaning on its tax and cyber practice capabilities, delivery partners, and acquisitions among its top choices.

PwC’s Industrial Structural Transformation framework: A road map to the firm’s ability to execute through integrated scale and packaged services

Here lies the opportunity for PwC: developing a framework that demonstrates unity and focus while relying on its core success around trust. During the event, PwC unveiled an Industrial Structural Transformation (IST) framework, which we believe provides the necessary road map to execute against the firm’s aspiration of what the next chapter of the firm might look like. Bringing together all parts of the business — Assurance, Tax, Advisory and Consulting — and replicating them across industries while using data intelligence and a fee-for-service commercial model can help PwC build a foundation that resonates across all member firms.

Starting with use cases in Japan across segments like mobility provides a glimpse into how the framework can be applied as the evolution of AI extends into the physical world, and how the architecture of the entire industry can be transformed beyond the use of the software to include the business and social rules. Developing the backbone of going to market through integrated scale is the first step. Executing against it, especially bringing use cases outside of Japan to other member firms, which often deal with their local client issues, can prove to be a rewarding challenge.

Three key areas which PwC Japan discussed at length during the event — sustainability, risk management and tax — brought to light the closer collaboration and applicability of the framework at scale between the various parts of PwC’s portfolio. Sustainability and risk management bring together assurance and consulting while tax provides a conduit for closer collaboration with consulting.

Developing solutions that are function-specific provides the necessary horizontal connection across these areas while relying on the firm’s industry knowledge to demonstrate value and deliver outcomes. We believe a large portion of PwC’s success will come from including its technology partners at every step of development, deployment and management of its IST framework as partner feedback and knowledge management have become as critical as ever to understand how professional services companies go to market.

Application of technology solutions beyond the marketing hype elevates PwC Japan’s soberness and readiness to support the global network in handling macro disruptors

Virtually no market discussions today exclude data and AI. Takuya Fujikawa, PwC Japan Group Chief AI Officer, Data and AI Leader, took the opportunity to provide an update on the firm’s data and AI practice at the onset of the second day of the event. One important nuance struck TBR about PwC Japan’s portfolio: its applicability of AI across multiple domain areas, rather than simply drilling down on generative AI or agentic AI, which have been the predominant focus in similar settings. Adhering to open data principles while relying on its industry and functional expertise provides a strong foundation for the firm’s data and AI portfolio with examples around threat intelligence, intelligent business analytics or power market analytics highlighting various use cases.

With PwC US recently launching the Agentic Operating System, we expect PwC Japan to lean on these experiences and capabilities and follow suit with agentic AI solutions that meet local client needs for driving efficient operations. We expect the rollout to be bidirectional and other member firms to look to collaborate with PwC Japan on emulating its portfolio offerings. Scaling the use of such solutions will fit nicely and support PwC Japan consulting’s three-layer growth model, especially around the data intelligence and data monetization opportunities and the tech-enabled arbitrage model.

Additionally, discussions throughout the second day provided deeper insights into other strategic domains of PwC Japan’s portfolio, such as sustainability and trust, including cybersecurity. Common themes across value creation enabled through technology amplified the need for better alignment among practice areas within PwC Japan, especially as buyers’ focus in each area has shifted toward translating respective market challenges to business implications.

Within sustainability, PwC remains focused on creating customer value by emphasizing cross-business themes, including decarbonization and biodiversity, with most of the opportunities centered on government reporting mandates, further demonstrating the need for collaboration between audit and consulting services.

Withing trust, leadership highlighted cybersecurity and cyber intelligence services – both important elements of PwC Japan’s strategy – including its collaboration with delivery partners, such as with TIS Inc. for use of remote monitoring, alert responses and emergency interventions, among other security services.

Enabled by a humble and gracious culture, PwC Japan sets the bar high for what’s next in the firm’s strategy evolution

Just as technologies arm PwC consultants with tools to solve complex business challenges, the Technology Laboratory provides the enabling environment for all presentations, as regardless if executives spoke about audit and assurance, tax, advisory or consulting, they all leaned on a piece of technology that helped them connect the dots between art of the possible and the answer through the tangible.

As macroeconomic uncertainty persists, PwC has realized that instead of trying to fix issues outside its control, it is better to focus on its own transformation to prepare for addressing client challenges. We recognize there is still an opportunity for the firm to strengthen relationships with both internal and external stakeholders, including its alliance partners. Building a strong, common foundation for member firms is a crucial first step for integrated scaling. This involves connecting the Technology Laboratory and Experience Centers to deploy BXT and BMR at scale. Leveraging their experience with fixed-price contracts, they can then pivot toward fee-for-service models, providing the necessary frameworks for collaboration.

PwC Japan Group and its leadership set the bar high for its member firm counterparts in what it would take for the firms to work together more closely. Starting with better service line collaboration and portfolio offerings rollouts to establishing common KPIs and shared services are some of the prerequisites, and PwC Japan seems to have the ingredients to make it work all together. And while clients are less worried about how a firm operates and are more focused on solving their business and technology problems, working with a vendor that has its own house in order certainly makes it an easier partnership.

Building on last year’s theme of modernization, where Informatica highlighted innovations to fast-track migrations from legacy PowerCenter and Master Data Management (MDM) to Informatica Data Management Cloud (IDMC) in the cloud — accounting for over half of Informatica’s business — Informatica World 2025 in Las Vegas was all about agentic AI, and the crucial, yet still sometimes overlooked, role of data. With its ability to apply reasoning to handle more complex, multipart workflows, agentic AI has rapidly emerged as AI’s next frontier. Although agentic AI promises increased productivity, AI agents require a few key elements, including orchestration, a vast knowledge base and governance. With the wealth of metadata in CLAIRE, the AI engine powering IDMC, it was only a matter of time until Informatica used some of its core differentiators to push into the agentic AI space to not only craft a future for more autonomous data management but also to give customers the tools needed to build and orchestrate their own agents.

Informatica enters agentic AI race

Informatica employs two strategies relative to generative AI (GenAI): Informatica for GenAI, in which customers use IDMC’s data management capabilities to enable enterprises’ GenAI use cases; and GenAI from Informatica, where customers leverage Informatica’s GenAI offerings. Those products include CLAIRE Copilot, which entered general availability at the event, and CLAIRE GPT, which is used by over 550 clients to streamline tasks within IDMC such as pulling datasets and interacting with catalogs. On the annual conference’s 25th anniversary, Informatica formally entered the agentic AI space with a similar approach, giving customers the ability to consume AI agents within IDMC for more autonomous data management and a tool for letting customers build, manage and orchestrate their own AI agents.

• CLAIRE Agents: As part of the GenAI from Informatica strategy, Informatica introduced eight new agents to support tasks across the data life cycle. The agents, which are expected to begin preview in 2H25, are Data Quality, Data Discovery, Data Lineage, Data Ingestion, ETL [Extract, Transform Load], Modernization, Product Experience and Data Exploration. Architecturally speaking, these agents will round out the IDMC platform, sitting above the metadata system of intelligence, with CLAIRE Copilot and GPT acting as user experience (UX) overlays, where customers can interact with these agents.

Nearly every facet of IT has emerged as a prominent use case for GenAI, including data management, and customers are looking for ways to streamline more system-level tasks. Provided customers are prepared to move from manual — or even predictive and conversational AI engineering — to agentic AI, these new data management agents can help absorb a lot of back-end data management tasks, including developing the data pipelines and reducing some of the burden on the user, whose primary focus now becomes managing the agents.

• AI Agent Engineering: In agentic AI, the hyperscalers and SaaS vendors are racing to position as the AI control tower. As more vendors push into the PaaS space and the resulting AI agents convolute the applications layer, the question becomes, “Which set of vendors are positioned to abstract that complexity in a governed way?” At the event, Informatica entered the space with the introduction of AI Agent Engineering, a new tool to help users build their own agents using the popular low-code/no-code drag-and-drop experience. Additionally, AI Agent Hub, which acts as a marketplace within AI Agent Engineering, helps users find, manage and connect these agents, including not just Informatica’s CLAIRE agents but also the tools customers are already using to build agents, such as Amazon Bedrock, Azure OpenAI, Google Vertex and Salesforce’s Agentforce. When it comes to building and orchestrating AI agents, customers have a range of options, but one of the compelling things about Informatica entering this space is its ability to provide the federated governance and access controls around these agents without disrupting existing workflows. Governance remains one of the leading barriers to GenAI adoption, and while some overlap will always exist between the hyperscalers and data ISVs, the hyperscalers recognize Informatica’s reputation for helping customers build trust in their data and ability to apply that trust in a vendor-agnostic way.

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Ecosystem developments

As we often discuss, Informatica maintains a high degree of neutrality and can effectively work across a range of technology partners without introducing significant overlap. Maintaining its commitment to working within the technology ecosystem, Informatica announced new product integrations across its technology partners, including the following highlights.

• Microsoft: Microsoft’s play at the PaaS layer (e.g., Synapse, Power Platform) and ability to extend the Dynamics 365 data model to enable Customer 360 analytics make it an invaluable, somewhat unique partner to Informatica. Reaffirming Informatica’s commitment to Microsoft, CLAIRE Copilot was built using the Azure OpenAI Service. The launch of Microsoft Fabric last year seemed to mark a turning point in the alliance, as Informatica was granted status as an early design partner for Fabric, which has amassed 21,000 paid customers in the span of 18 months. Essentially, this status allows Informatica to make its Data Quality tool available as a native service, so customers can profile and assess data using Informatica as it gets ingested into Microsoft Fabric via the OneLake repository in real time. At the event, Informatica made Data Quality available (in public preview) as its own Fabric application. In addition, as part of its commitment to staying relevant within the Microsoft Fabric ecosystem, Informatica will start supporting Apache Iceberg in Microsoft Fabric, which is important as Microsoft looks to cement its commitment to open standards. These developments come as part of a new strategic agreement between Informatica and Microsoft, which implies not just a focus on R&D but also investment in the joint go-to-market approach. Having Informatica exist as a first-class citizen within the Microsoft stack could make the case for customers to explore other components of IDMC, creating deeper synergies with services partners like KPMG that use Informatica and Microsoft Fabric, both internally and externally for data modernization and transformation.
• Salesforce*: Though Informatica and Salesforce technically had a preexisting alliance, the partnership was formalized at Informatica World 2025 with the announcement that IDMC will be integrated with Salesforce’s Agentforce. Specifically, Informatica plans to deliver MDM SaaS with Agentforce, effectively putting the 360-degree wrapper around agents that customers build in Salesforce’s platform. As previously mentioned, customers will also be able consume Agentforce via Informatica AI Agent Engineering upon availability later this year. Salesforce sees Informatica as a key player in the market and is looking to strengthen its play in data management and governance in accordance with Agentforce, so this partnership is a win for Salesforce. In turn, Informatica seems to recognize the role Agentforce will play in the AI ecosystem for sales and service use cases, and it will be interesting to see how this partnership progresses and if Salesforce ends up joining Informatica’s seven other, more established technology partners.

On the services side, Informatica continues to cement its value across nine core global systems integrator (GSI) partners, which collectively staff 30,000 Informatica professionals. In 2024, Informatica earned 15,000 certifications, up over 20% year-to-year. Vendor sentiment and our own conversations with enterprise IT decision makers suggest that for AI to effectively scale, data needs to be in the cloud. As such, modernization will continue to be a big focus for Informatica and its partners through 2025. This includes AI-powered modernization and potentially using the new CLAIRE Agents, specifically Modernization, to help migrate on-premises data to IDMC. When it comes to agentic AI, Informatica’s new innovations should open new doors for services partners to not only modernize data management tasks ahead of GenAI deployments but also help clients create new custom agents (using AI Agent Engineering), including those tailored to certain industries, and make them relevant within existing workflows.

Between the technology partners and GSIs, Informatica works with a robust ecosystem of partners in a triparty approach, where resources from a hyperscaler, GSI and Informatica are brought together to help customers modernize their data faster and, by default, hasten AI’s time to value. When we survey and speak to alliance decision makers at IT services firms, data management comes up as one of the top areas for partner-led growth, signaling to the ecosystem that they will continue to invest in resources to guide conversations with customers with the technology maturity to address the data foundations ahead of GenAI.

Conclusion

Agentic AI has a lot of promise but also some challenges. The proliferation of AI agents will create more best-of-breed complexity — which we know customers are trying to move away from — and heighten concerns around data privacy and governance. Informatica’s move into the agentic AI space with both CLAIRE Agents and AI Agent Engineering is certainly in step with the market; we all know AI agents do not exist in silos, so Informatica’s ability to work within its ecosystem of tech partners and connect agents in a vendor-neutral way is particularly compelling. Meanwhile, Informatica’s robust engineering relationships with the hyperscalers, as evidenced by Informatica’s Data Quality integration with Microsoft Fabric, will continue to elevate its standing with the big GSIs and foster a compelling triparty alliance approach focused on helping customers get their data ready for AI.

*After Informatica World, on May 27, Informatica entered into an agreement to be acquired by Salesforce. Informatica will continue to operate as a stand-alone entity until the acquisition closes, likely in Salesforce’s FY27. Please see TBR’s Salesforce coverage for further insights.

‘AI can be a knowledge management accelerator, but only if well-fed by an enterprise’s own data’

In February TBR met with two AI leaders in Fujitsu’s European Platform Business to better understand the company’s approach to the AI market, its evolving AI capabilities and offerings, and what we can expect as 2025 unfolds. Maria Levina, AI Business analyst, and Karl Hausdorf, head of AI Business, gave a detailed presentation focused primarily on the European market. The following reflects both that briefing and TBR’s ongoing research and analysis of Fujitsu, the company’s partners and peers, and the overall AI landscape.
 
One highlight that illustrates many facets of Fujitsu’s approach to AI was Levina and Hausdorf’s description of Fujitsu’s customers’ choices between “bring your own data” and “bring your own AI.” The first allows more AI-mature customers to bring their data into a Fujitsu-provided on-premises solution with full support for scaling, maintaining hardware and software, and updating, as needed.
 
The second allows customers to run their own AI stack on a Fujitsu “validated and optimized” platform, developed and maintained by Fujitsu and select technology partners. Critical, in TBR’s view, is Fujitsu’s positioning of these options as responsive to clients’ needs, as determined by all AI stakeholders within an enterprise, including IT, AI and business leaders.
 
Levina and Hausdorf explained, “Together, with our ecosystem of partners, we’re committed to unlock the potential of generative AI for our clients” through “on-premises data sovereign, sustainable private GPT and AI solutions,” focused on “rapid ROI.” Fujitsu is not approaching clients with a technology solution, but rather with options on how to address and solve business problems. As the Fujitsu team said, “Understand the why, know the what, and co-create the how.” The Fujitsu team also noted that the company’s industry expertise resides in the processes and workflows unique and/or critical to an industry.
 

‘Maintaining control of data means owning your AI in the future’

Before diving into Fujitsu’s AI offerings, the Fujitsu team laid out their understanding of the European market, sharing data the company collected around AI adoption, use of AI platforms, and barriers to growth (in Fujitsu’s phrasing, “progress-limiting factors,” which is perhaps a more positive spin on the usual list of barriers and challenges). Fujitsu surveyed or spoke with 400 data and IT professionals across six European countries, and the results indicated that overcoming legacy mindsets continues to be a major impediment to adopting and harnessing the value of AI.
 
TBR’s November 2024 Voice of the Customer Research similarly noted challenges in Europe with “the lack of engagement from employees who are being asked to change.” The Fujitsu team noted that change management, therefore, had to involve all AI stakeholders, including “IT people, business people and AI people” within an enterprise.
 
In TBR’s experience, IT services companies and consultancies continue to find new constituents for change management at their clients as the promise — and disruption — of AI becomes more widespread, reinforcing Fujitsu’s strategy of bringing change management to all AI stakeholders. Lastly, the Fujitsu team noted that within European clients, expectations around AI have heightened, especially as AI initiatives have launched across multiple business units. Again, Fujitsu’s research and TBR’s Voice of the Customer Research align around ROI expectations as AI matures.
 
The Fujitsu team introduced their AI platform by delineating the key performance indicators they believe a successful platform must have: scaling, performance and speed, simplicity, energy efficiency, AI services in data centers, and GPUs.
 
Although TBR is not in a position to evaluate the technological strengths, completeness or complexity of Fujitsu’s platform, the expansive KPIs indicate Fujitsu has considered not only the IT needs behind an AI deployment but also the larger business factors, particularly the financial impacts. Levina and Hausdorf then dove into the details, including the two customer options described above (bring your own data and bring your own AI). They discussed how Fujitsu offers consulting around the technical and business implications of AI platforms and solutions, including an “AI Test Drive,” which allows clients to test AI solutions before investing in new technologies, large language models (LLMs) or other AI components.
 
Notably for TBR, Fujitsu’s presentation extensively highlighted the company’s AI alliance partners, including Intel, NVIDIA, AMD and NetApp, as well as a slew of LLM providers, demonstrating an appreciation for the collaborative and ecosystem-dependent nature of AI at the enterprise level. The Fujitsu team also stressed the European nature of its AI strategy and platform.
 
European clients, Fujitsu noted, had specific requirements related to the European Union’s (EU) General Data Protection Regulation and the EU AI Act, as well as a preference for on-premises solutions. Some of the use cases Levina and Hausdorf described included a law firm using Fujitsu-enabled AI solutions to analyze case data, contracts, corporate and public legal documents, and multiple deployments of Fujitsu-enabled private GPTs.

Additional observations

• Fujitsu remains focused on targeting customers already aligned with the company around AI, a strategy that TBR believes speeds ROI and increases client retention.
• In contrast to some peers in the IT services market, Fujitsu has capabilities across the entire AI technology stack — hardware, software and service — which Levina and Hausdorf called “highly appealing,” especially to European clients.
• Levina and Hausdorf made two comments that, in TBR’s view, neatly sum up AI at present: “AI can be a knowledge management accelerator, but only if well-fed by an enterprise’s own data” and “maintaining control of data means owning your AI in the future.”

Fujitsu’s AI prowess makes it an invaluable partner

TBR has reported extensively on Fujitsu’s evolving AI capabilities and offerings, noting in a special report in May 2024: “TBR appreciates that Fujitsu’s combination of compute power and proven AI expertise makes the company a significant competitor and/or alliance partner for nearly every player fighting to turn GenAI [generative AI] hype into revenue.
 
“Second, Fujitsu’s vision of ‘converging technologies’ aligns exceptionally well with the more tectonic trends TBR has been observing in the technology space, indicating that Fujitsu’s market positioning is more strategic than transactional or opportunistic.” Add in Fujitsu’s deepening experience in delivering AI solutions to AI clients, and TBR continues to see tremendous near-term opportunity and growth for Fujitsu and its ecosystem partners.