The Hackett Group® Announces Winners of the 2026 Hackett Innovation Awards
11 organizations recognized for delivering measurable AI-driven business value
The Hackett Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:HCKT), an ROI-led AI transformation firm, today announced the winners of its annual Hackett Innovation Awards, recognizing organizations that are using artificial intelligence (AI) to redesign enterprise workflows, accelerate performance and deliver significant impact across their end-to-end business processes.
"The winning organizations are moving beyond AI experimentation to reinvent workflows, operating models, and enterprise performance around measurable outcomes and sustained ROI," said The Hackett Group® Managing Director of Europe David Ketchin. "They are clear on the value they want to deliver, they rethink how work gets done across people and technology, and they invest purposefully in developing the skills and structures needed to make that change lasting and at scale."
This year’s winners are:
Elanco – Winner, Purchase-to-Pay: Agentic AI Ecosystems: Reimagining Elanco PTP (Purchase-to-Pay)
Elanco’s procure-to-pay team had historically operated as "human middleware" who manually processed over 30,000 queries annually – error-prone interventions that often took more than 10 minutes each. To streamline operations and better support its mission of providing health solutions for pets and livestock, Elanco developed a two-layer agent-based AI ecosystem that leveraged ElancoGPT, the company’s secure AI platform. Layer one, AskSAP, enabled employees to query records via natural language. Layer two, a procure-to-pay agent, autonomously scans vendor emails, identifies intent, cross-references records with live enterprise resource planning (ERP) data, and drafts responses, which are then reviewed by employees. Query resolution time dropped to under 10 seconds, a 99% reduction. The new system also eliminated 30%-40% of manual purchase-to-pay queries.
GSK India Global Services Private Limited – Winner, Service Desk: HelpHub Transformation
The EMEA and APAC Procure-to-Pay Service Desk was constrained by an inefficient operating model. Support was split across multiple hubs, resulting in fragmented ownership, high inter-hub dependencies, and higher costs to serve. Deploying a Gen AI-powered real-time translator and an agentic AI smart query router has sped up response times while cutting costs. In its first three years, HelpHub has saved $4.03 million (£3 million), cut waiting times 40%, raised first-contact resolution from 88% to 93%, and boosted user experience scores from 4.3 to 4.9 out of 5. So far, the return on investment (ROI) has topped 150%, and further upside is expected.
Hitachi Energy – Winner, Plan-to-Source-to-Make-to-Deliver: Agentic AI-Powered Automation of Inbound Delivery Notes and Order Acknowledgments
Hitachi Energy manages one of the world’s most complex supply chains. Its production facilities consist of a web of more than 100 factories with over 20,000 suppliers that annually generate two million inbound delivery lines and around three million purchase order lines yearly. To manage that complexity while ensuring compliance, Hitachi Energy has rolled out an agentic AI solution to automate the end-to-end Inbound Delivery Note (IBDN) and Order Acknowledgment (OA) processes. With this solution, downstream goods are received faster, production disruptions are fewer, and overall compliance risk across the supply chain is lower. Payback for the IBDN system took four months, while for the OA solution, it was less than four months.
IBM – Winner, Risk-to-Compliance: Infusing AI Across the TPRM Lifecycle, Integrated With ProcessUnity
IBM’s global supply chain cyber-risk team was recognized for transforming third-party risk management through a network of specialized AI agents. By automating traditionally manual activities, such as enhancing supplier context, proactively identifying supplier trust and compliance centers, and streamlining assessments, the team reduced cycle time by 50%, enabling analysts to focus on higher-value strategic risk activities.
Infosys – Winner, Order-to-Cash: Agentic AI in Finance
Infosys launched an initiative to transform its order-to-cash operations and accelerate free cash flow, a key chief financial officer (CFO) priority. With accounts receivable (AR) tracking spanning SAP, email, and supplier portals, Infosys BPM identified an opportunity to unify data and modernize collections, and implemented an agentic AI-powered AR overdue management platform built on Infosys Agentic Foundry. The platform orchestrates seven specialized AI agents through a single dashboard to automate overdue tracking across systems while enabling real-time visibility, proactive follow-ups, and end-to-end control. In the first year, the initiative delivered a $62M improvement in free cash flow, a 3.9% reduction in overdue AR, and a 66% reduction in manual processing.
Robert Bosch GmbH – Winner, AI/Automation Center of Excellence: Digital Accelerator Framework (DAF): Commercial Process Reengineering Through AI@Work
Global Business Services at Bosch sought a scalable, process-led approach to identifying and prioritizing high-value AI and automation opportunities across complex global operations. As digital complexity increased, Bosch needed a structured framework to analyze processes and prioritize automation initiatives based on potential value. To address this challenge, Bosch developed the Digital Accelerator Framework (DAF), a structured methodology that includes an AI-powered platform combining process intelligence, lean redesign principles and governed execution to accelerate transformation. The solution was developed by the Bosch Digital Talent Academy, an internal program focused on developing young talent with strong capabilities in software development, data and Al. DAF delivered payback within six months by identifying high-impact automation opportunities and measurable productivity improvements across commercial operations.
Sanofi – Winner, Source-to-Purchase: Procurement Data Booster
Procurement Data Booster exemplifies Sanofi’s business-led, data-driven, and AI-powered approach by transforming heterogeneous documents into accessible, actionable procurement intelligence and unlocking insights from unstructured data that was previously unavailable for systemic analytics. The solution addresses a common challenge, whereby critical information is embedded in contracts, emails, and other records that are not easily captured through traditional reporting tools. Procurement Data Booster has reduced the cycle time for the generation of procurement insights by over 85% and considerably enhanced the quality of decision-making, enabling significant additional value creation.
Sidetrade – Winner, Technology Operations: Agentic Operating Model: How Sidetrade Rebuilt Its Enterprise Around AI
Sidetrade, an order-to-cash intelligence company, sells agentic AI to large enterprises and now runs on it. Rather than adding coding assistants to unchanged processes, it redesigned how software gets built, embedding autonomous AI agents at every delivery stage. The new AI operating model was fully rolled out across their 150-person product and engineering organization, following an initial pilot completed in summer 2025. The gains have been exponential. A feature once scoped 80 person-days now delivered in three, throughput up 26X, with quality gates ensuring speed never costs control. Sidetrade is extending this agentic transformation to customer operations, sales, support and finance, each wave self-funding the next.
The judges also named three finalists:
Ferring Pharmaceuticals – Finalist, Purchase-to-Pay: Agentic AP Fusion: AI Automation for ZeroTouch P2P, Powered by Genpact
Ferring’s accounts payable (AP) function manually processes over 165,000 invoices per year, relying heavily on manual controls, which impacted supplier statement reconciliation and the accuracy of invoice data capture, resulting in increased operational costs and duplicate payments. To solve these problems, the company embedded two AI-powered automation solutions into the procure-to-pay process. The benefits have included elimination of duplicate and erroneous payments, a 60% reduction in manual effort for data capture, and significant savings from efficiency gains, including more efficient working capital.
GSK – Finalist, Source-to-Purchase: Digital Procurement Transformation
GSK was recognized for its innovative approach to enhancing operational efficiency and driving value through digital procurement transformation. GSK consolidated fragmented legacy systems into a unified, AI-powered source-to-pay ecosystem, integrating vendor data, workflows, and a control tower for real-time oversight. This platform, with its supplier portal, real-time invoice tracking, automatic translations and multi-user support, helps GSK’s teams and partners work more efficiently to help deliver vital medicines and vaccines globally.
Tetra Pak – Finalist, Source-to-Purchase: SuM Data Agent
Tetra Pak’s procurement teams faced fragmented data across purchasing, spend and market sources – resulting in slow, inconsistent and intuition-driven decisions. The SuM Data Agent solves this by introducing a conversational AI layer that unifies these domains and delivers instant, traceable insights. Acting as a personal senior analyst, it enables users to validate price changes, detect contract leakage, identify cost savings, prepare negotiations and simulate future scenarios. The solution improves negotiation outcomes and accelerates decision-making by up to 40%. By transforming complex data into clear, actionable intelligence, Tetra Pak drives faster, more confident decisions – unlocking exceptional value, with a projected ROI exceeding 6,000%.
The 2026 submissions reveal a clear playbook for AI success and best practices: prioritize workforce and process transformation over technology adoption, and redesign how work gets done so AI can assist, augment, and act autonomously to deliver measurable business outcomes at scale.
"The winners are proving that AI value comes from redesigning work, not just deploying technology," said Kyle McNabb, principal and program leader for AI Applied Intelligence at The Hackett Group®. "By embedding AI into workflows and operations, they are delivering measurable performance gains, sustainable ROI and real enterprise value."
"Organizations are viewing AI as an enabler of enterprise transformation," added Vin Kumar, principal, AI Enablement and Digital Operations practice at The Hackett Group®. "Moving beyond back-office efficiency, many are now identifying breakthrough opportunities across revenue-generating and R&D functions."
The 2026 Hackett Innovation Awards highlight how leading organizations are transforming AI from experimentation into scalable enterprise performance advantage.
About The Hackett Group®
The Hackett Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:HCKT) is an ROI-led, AI enterprise transformation firm that helps clients enable AI world-class performance. Its experts and engineers leverage proprietary AI delivery platforms – Hackett AI XPLR™, ZBrain™, XT™, AIXelerator™ and AskHackett™ – to accelerate and enhance the delivery of the company’s solutions and services.
The AI platforms are powered by the company’s domain-specific Hackett Solution Language Model informed by Hackett Process and Performance Intelligence – including Digital World Class® benchmark metrics, best-practice process flows and service delivery model solution frameworks, which accelerate and enhance the delivery of its services. The Hackett Group’s proprietary insights are based on benchmarking results from leading global organizations, including 98% of Dow Jones Global Titans, 97% of the Dow Jones Industrials and 90% of the Fortune 100. Visit www.thehackettgroup.com
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