In this episode of HFS Unfiltered Stories, Saurabh Gupta, President of HFS Research, sits down with Shveta Arora, SVP & Global Head of Consulting at Cognizant, for a candid conversation about one of the most contested questions in enterprise tech right now: what does AI actually do to consulting?

The consensus fear is that AI hollows out consulting. Shveta makes the opposite case, there will be more consulting because of AI, not less, and walks through the structural shifts already reshaping how the work gets delivered. Consultants are moving beyond “slideware” to vibe-code show-and-tell prototypes and working proofs of concept. Agentic transformations now demand consulting and domain expertise embedded across the entire lifecycle, not just the front end, but through build (context engineering, ontology engineering) and into run, where agent performance is continuously improved after deployment.

Saurabh and Shveta dig into the model makers, Anthropic, OpenAI, and others — moving into the services market, and why Shveta sees that as the biggest possible endorsement of how valuable services are. They unpack Cognizant's concept of the “AI velocity gap”, the distance between raw model capability and the enterprise value clients can realize, and why services are the only way to close it. The conversation also brings HFS Research's “services-as-software” thesis to life, with customer service and high-volume processes like payroll and accounts payable as concrete examples of agent-run, human-managed delivery.

Finally, the two tackle the hardest unsolved problems: enterprise “talent debt” (which Shveta argues leaders should tackle before technology debt), bottom-up innovation as the way to bring employees along, the broken economics of buying AI-enabled services when rate cards and token-based pricing both fall short, and how her own leadership style is shifting toward a hands-on “player coach” model. A sharp, fast-moving discussion for anyone navigating the future of consulting, BPO, and enterprise AI.