Global Analyst Summit 2026: Value Creation Through Operating Model Transformation
EY leads with a focus on value creation to transition consulting into its next phase
In May EY hosted the analyst community, larger clients and senior leaders, including EY Global Chair and CEO Janet Truncale as well as EY Global Vice Chair of Consulting Errol Gardner, in New York City over two days for its first Global Analyst Summit since 2024.
As consulting continues to evolve due to AI’s influence on business models and day-to-day operations across enterprises, EY’s leaders discussed how the firm is adapting its approach to guide clients through uncertainty and increased speed of change, and introduced featured clients, giving them an opportunity to share their experiences. The client stories emphasized the speed at which they need to navigate market changes and their desire to work with a long-term partner such as EY to guide the transformation as well as to create an ecosystem of vendors that support their end goals. The notion of value was consistent throughout the event, as the firm seeks to reconfirm its positioning in the consulting space despite ongoing market uncertainty about consulting’s future relevance.
Ecosystems and collaboration within the firm as well as with alliance partners and clients are essential to transformation
To kick off the event, Truncale gave an update on EY’s strategy and direction amid the dynamic market backdrop. When Truncale assumed the role of CEO in 2024, she quickly sought to establish the firm as a trusted brand and increased collaboration across EY. Shortly thereafter, the firm launched its All In strategy, which reemphasized the core foundations of EY: to build a better working world and to shape the future with confidence.
To improve its global structure, in July 2025, EY consolidated its geographic landscape from 18 regions to 10, allowing for greater collaboration and the enablement of connected services. EY conducted a “pulse check” to ensure the firm’s strategy and overall direction were aligned with market needs and with where clients were maturing and positioning. Truncale noted that looking too far into the future is a “fool’s game,” pushing the firm to look more closely every five to 10 months, given the rate of change.
As EY has a larger footprint and scale, with more than 400,000 employees and over 240,000 clients, the more frequent pulse checks and refreshes are necessary for the firm to keep pace with peers and adapt its overall direction. With its larger scale, Truncale emphasized the value of EY’s partner ecosystems and how partners serve as a lever for the firm to move faster on innovation, delivery and market positioning.
Through “confident collaboration,” EY is able to accomplish more and generate value for clients more quickly. As part of this, EY assists clients in creating their own ecosystems to continue executing on their transformations and evolving across business operations and strategy. The importance of ecosystems was evident throughout the event, with featured clients noting the close relationship they have with EY and the direction their relationship is headed.
EY has always done a good job of focusing on the firm’s core strengths: what it does really well, what it is most known for and/or what it is most established in. This tactic holds true today, as Truncale discussed how the firm navigates hype versus reality, particularly around AI and technology adoption. Notably, she indicated how the firm is embedding new technologies and capabilities internally to transform its operating model with trust and governance at the forefront.
Operating model trust provides two main benefits for EY. First, it exemplifies how the firm serves as client zero for clients; experiencing the operating model transformation firsthand gives the firm the expertise to effectively lead similar projects, enhanced by its industry expertise. Second, creating a more agile organization enables EY to move more quickly as it works with external partners, executes changes internally and better leverages its global network.
EY’s people remain the firm’s most vital asset and a primary investment area
At the heart of operating model transformation is EY’s people. Both Truncale and Sonia Sande, EY’s Global Consulting Talent Leader, discussed how EY is investing in its talent to navigate market changes and enable the firm to drive impactful change through technology.
With a substantial proportion of its people under 30, EY’s balanced multigenerational workforce is a strategic advantage: early-career professionals bring fresh perspectives, digital fluency and AI-native ways of working, while senior professionals contribute the judgment, domain expertise and client experience needed to guide transformation responsibly. This challenges the claim that there are fewer early-career opportunities and instead highlights the value EY places on its staff to drive change for its clients using new ideas and concepts, which will help strengthen the value of consulting regardless of market conditions. EY also continues to invest in its talent, indicating that 90% of the firm is upskilled in AI to operate at a higher level and be more productive. A key distinction of EY’s AI policies is encouraging the use of the technology rather than mandating that it be used for a certain amount of time or tracking its usage. This approach ensures that EY can maintain the quality of its services to ensure client relationships and portfolio remain solid.
Sande walked through four main capability frameworks that are guiding EY’s upskilling initiative: AI skills, transformative consultant, human skills and all-in leadership. AI skills prioritize the build-out of technology skills, leveraging domain- and sector-specific AI content. The need for human in the loop is an important part of EY’s strategy to ensure quality as well as provide accountability for risks and outcomes. Accountability is becoming increasingly important as engagements shift toward outcome-based projects. The focus on leadership setting an example will be a critical piece of EY’s upskilling plans as it sets the direction for growth. The firm’s culture has always emphasized learning, such as through the EY Badges program, which has evolved due to leadership’s ongoing support.
EY’s investment in talent is core to its ability to showcase the value of its consulting portfolio. Encouraging the use of AI rather than mandates allows for quality control and stronger ties to outcomes that will benefit EY in the long run through increased productivity and greater impact. The firm’s recognition of the need to adapt its operating model and transform its talent to work with market changes is reflected in the collaborative engagements EY facilitates with its clients.
Value-oriented frameworks underpin EY’s client engagements
As projects have shifted from one-and-done — fix a process or outsource it — to a transformative approach focused on continual upgrades and improvements, EY drives client engagements through a new framework. This framework prioritizes value creation and seeks to be “transformative, not transformed.” The value-oriented framework includes three steps: identify, orchestrate and realize.
The first step, identify, focuses on where value is trapped by using strategic concepts to reimagine and innovate across the organization. The second stage, orchestrate, is the execution lever, which manages multiple capabilities and creates agility to support changes. The last step, realize, leads the change across the organization. The third step aims to reimagine the business to create sustainable value.
Defining and measuring value can pose challenges, as these steps vary across industries. Leading with the concept of business reimagination allows EY to start with the client’s business problem, analyze the impact of the problem across the organization, and make recommendations about other pieces of the business. This approach can create long-term consulting-led relationships by guiding the transformation of each functional business unit, provided EY can effectively create value during the initial phases of the projects.
An industrial products client described the relationship with EY where, most recently, EY led the client’s shift into a new business with a new strategy definition and intertwined areas of the client’s business, enabling it to better pursue new opportunities. The client highlighted how EY’s strategy and technology knowledge set it apart and made the project more impactful. Unsurprisingly, the client mentioned the importance of outcomes and how it shared responsibility with EY. The focus on outcomes ties back to EY’s emphasis on trust and brand as strengths. If the firm is sharing the responsibility and accountability for their advisory services and actions, clients will be more closely aligned.
A key differentiator for EY, as indicated by the client, is how EY helped identify core strengths that led to a strategy that better resonates and core business units.
AI on its own does not drive value creation
One of the most interesting presentations at the summit was the AI session led by Dan Diasio, EY Global AI Leader, and Traci Gusher, Americas AI & Data Leader. The presentation stood out not because it focused on AI as a stand-alone technology, but because it reframed AI as a shareholder value lever anchored in operating model transformation, rather than a discrete innovation agenda. Diasio emphasized that the primary shift underway is not technological, but structural, with AI forcing enterprises to rethink how their businesses operate end to end. Achieving meaningful impact requires moving beyond isolated use cases toward end-to-end transformation spanning strategy, processes, workforce, governance and technology, embedding AI directly into workflows and decision making rather than layering it onto existing processes. The discussion highlighted a growing divergence between leaders and laggards based on this shift from “bolt-on” to “built-in” adoption. Leaders are reimagining workflows, products and enterprise value propositions with AI embedded at the core, while laggards continue to apply AI to discrete processes for incremental efficiency gains with limited broader impact.
A central element of EY’s positioning is “knowledge as infrastructure,” where domain expertise, policies and data are codified into executable systems that enable trusted, real-time decisioning within business processes. At the event, EY.ai Value Blueprints were positioned as a mechanism to operationalize this shift, helping organizations move from fragmented AI initiatives to AI-native transformation with measurable business outcomes, by embedding AI across interconnected execution layers and value streams.
The session also emphasized that scaling AI introduces new requirements around trust, governance and control, particularly as organizations adopt agentic workflows. Embedding AI into core processes requires clear decision ownership, auditability and policy enforcement to ensure responsible and secure scaling.
Client discussions reinforced an emerging focus on outcomes over activity, with organizations prioritizing quality, integration and measurable impact rather than proliferating disconnected AI deployments. Overall, the presentation underscored a consistent theme: AI in isolation does not create value; value is realized when AI is embedded into the operating model, powered by codified knowledge, and aligned to enterprise transformation objectives.
EY Studio+ brings in the next phase of innovation for EY
Laurence Buchanan, EY’s Studio+ leader, led a discussion on how the firm is using the practice to showcase the breadth of EY’s technology, experience and industry offerings. The practice was brought together through more than 30 acquisitions over the past 10 years that enable partners to focus on growth through their client lens. The practice offers four main solutions: EY-Parthenon, customer experience, product service innovation and functional building blocks. Through these offerings, EY can drive new experiences and strategies for its clients by leveraging resources they already have.
Studio+ evolves EY’s Wavespace approach by focusing on client experience and a human-centric approach to better understand client positioning and business challenges. As market needs are changing more rapidly now than in the past, Studio+ can help clients experience the breadth of EY offerings to make changes across their organization. In TBR’s view, Studio+ brings together EY’s sector and transactions expertise and offerings to create long-standing relationships with clients.
EY’s success will be linked to its ability to communicate its portfolio and drive large-scale transformations
EY used its Global Analyst Summit to reinforce the message that transformation is not driven by technology alone but by an organization’s ability to reimagine its operating model, workforce and ecosystem to create measurable business value. Throughout the event, leaders consistently highlighted that AI serves as an enabler rather than the main transformation. To achieve this, EY continues to invest in trust and leverage its brand to deliver on governance, trust, talent development and organizational change that underpin transformation. This positioning is enhanced by its traditional strengths in risk, industry expertise and business transformation, particularly as the firm adapts its consulting portfolio to meet evolving client demands.
A key differentiator for EY remains its ability to connect strategy to execution. Through frameworks such as Enterprise Reimagined and the identify-orchestrate-realize value creation model, EY seeks to move beyond point solutions and discrete projects toward longer-term transformation relationships. The firm’s emphasis on helping clients identify trapped value, orchestrate change across functional silos and realize measurable business outcomes creates a more integrated approach that aligns consulting, technology, workforce and operational priorities. Client examples highlighted how this approach can help organizations focus on core strengths, navigate market disruption and pursue new growth opportunities while maintaining accountability for outcomes.
TBR believes EY’s continued investments in talent, AI capabilities and partner ecosystems position the firm well as enterprises increasingly seek trusted advisers to guide business transformation amid ongoing uncertainty. The firm’s focus on quality over quantity in AI deployments, combined with its commitment to governance and human oversight, reflects a pragmatic approach that resonates with enterprise concerns around risk and value realization. As consulting buyers place greater scrutiny on measurable outcomes and return on investment, EY’s ability to combine sector expertise, trusted relationships and enterprise-wide transformation capabilities will remain critical to sustaining growth and differentiating its consulting business in an increasingly competitive market.
Technology Business Research, Inc.