Deploy, respond, prepare

The forces that now matter most to enterprise leaders are the ones that arrive without warning and from an unexpected direction. They are not the swings of the business cycle, but rather the shocks of another kind, and they call for a different response, from leaders and from the advisors who work alongside them 

The AlixPartners Disruption Index takes an in-depth, quantitative look at how businesses are responding to these unpredictable forces across verticals, roles, and geographies. This sister publication, our second annual State of Enterprise Technology report, does something different. It sends a panel of our technologists and consultants into the field to capture what those responses look like up close, with the detail that only first-hand experience provides. Here we focus on the key trends, challenges and opportunities facing senior Technology leaders in corporates and PE settings. 

What we are seeing is a widening gap. AI sits behind almost every question we examine, at once the thing creating new capability and the thing disrupting the cost, security, and supplier arrangements organizations already depend on. The enterprises pulling ahead are investing in the wholesale transformation of operating models—and increasingly, business models too. Those still treating AI as a discrete program or cluster of self-contained projects, meanwhile, are accumulating cost and complexity with little to show for it. What separates the two groups, consistently, has less to do with budget or ambition than with a willingness to act and adapt amid uncertainty rather than wait for it to resolve. 

The chapters that follow uncover where value is being captured, where risk is building, and what the leaders are doing differently. We hope you are constructively challenged by these hard-won dispatches from the present future.