In a move that signals a fundamental reshaping of the professional services landscape, The Hackett Group has officially announced the launch of two sophisticated Generative AI-enabled platforms, XT™ and AIXelerator™. This strategic initiative is far more than a simple technological upgrade; it represents the culmination of a deliberate strategy to embed proprietary AI at the very core of its service delivery model. For an industry built on human expertise and analytical rigor, this launch marks a pivotal transition towards an AI-augmented future where consulting engagements are executed with a level of speed, efficiency, and data-driven insight previously considered unattainable. The introduction of these platforms completes a comprehensive suite of AI tools, positioning the firm not merely as an advisor on digital transformation but as a practitioner that leverages its own advanced technology to redefine how strategic value is conceived, developed, and delivered to its global clientele. This development sets a new benchmark, challenging the traditional consulting paradigm and heralding a new operational standard.
A Comprehensive AI Ecosystem
Completing the Full Suite of Gen AI Platforms
The debut of XT™ and AIXelerator™ marks the final step in the construction of a fully integrated, end-to-end AI ecosystem designed to support every phase of client engagement. This is not a collection of disparate tools but a cohesive suite engineered to work in concert, providing a seamless experience from initial strategic ideation to complex implementation and beyond. The suite now includes foundational platforms like Hackett AI XPLR™ and ZBrain™, which guide clients through their entire Gen AI journey, alongside the specialized AskHackett.ai™, which empowers the firm’s Executive Advisory and Market Intelligence programs. With the addition of XT™ for business transformation and AIXelerator™ for software implementation, The Hackett Group has assembled a formidable toolkit that addresses the full spectrum of client needs. This strategic completion transforms the company’s approach from offering AI-related advice to operating as an AI-native firm, where generative intelligence is the fundamental engine driving its consulting and transformation services, ensuring a consistent and powerful delivery model.
This integrated suite represents a profound strategic pivot, embedding AI as an intrinsic component of the company’s operational DNA rather than treating it as an ancillary technology or a standalone service offering. Chairman and CEO Ted Fernandez emphasized that this ecosystem fundamentally redefines the delivery of strategic value at a speed that was previously unimaginable. The vision is to create a symbiotic relationship between human consultants and AI platforms, where the technology handles the immense task of data processing and insight generation, freeing up human experts to focus on strategic interpretation, stakeholder alignment, and complex problem-solving. By creating a unified framework that spans from high-level advisory to granular project execution, the firm ensures that every recommendation and action is grounded in the same powerful, data-rich intelligence core. This holistic approach is designed to deliver not just incremental improvements but breakthrough results, establishing a new paradigm for how consulting firms can leverage proprietary AI to create a decisive competitive advantage.
Powered by Proprietary Hackett Intelligence
The true competitive differentiator of these newly launched platforms is not the AI technology itself, but the exclusive data on which it is trained: a vast, proprietary repository referred to as “Hackett Intelligence.” This is a meticulously curated knowledge base, developed over three decades of intensive research and thousands of client engagements with the world’s leading organizations. Unlike general-purpose AI models trained on broad, publicly available internet data, The Hackett Group’s proprietary Solution Language Model (SLM) is built upon a foundation of highly specific and valuable intellectual property. This includes detailed, industry-specific process flows, an unparalleled collection of enterprise performance benchmarks from 97% of the Dow Jones Industrials and 90% of the Fortune 100, and a codified library of best practices for achieving top-tier performance. This unique dataset imbues the AI with a deep contextual understanding that generic models lack, enabling it to deliver insights that are not only accurate but also highly relevant and actionable within a specific business context.
This focused training allows the SLM to function as a specialized expert rather than a generalist, providing nuanced and context-aware outputs that directly address complex business challenges. The platforms are designed to amplify the expertise of human consultants, serving as a powerful co-pilot that can rapidly synthesize information, identify patterns, and generate data-driven recommendations. Simultaneously, they offer clients an intuitive and simplified way to interact with incredibly complex information. Through natural-language queries, guided analytical workflows, and accelerated decision-making frameworks, clients can directly engage with the firm’s deep intellectual property without needing specialized data science skills. This synergy between exclusive data, advanced AI, and human expertise creates a powerful value proposition, enabling the delivery of measurable, high-impact outcomes with a level of precision and efficiency that sets a new industry standard and redefines the consultant-client relationship.
Platform Functionality and Impact
XT for Business Transformation
The XT™ platform is specifically engineered to serve as the central nervous system for consulting-led business transformation projects. It operates as a unified AI engine designed to ingest, process, and interpret vast and diverse volumes of client data with exceptional speed. Its capabilities extend beyond handling structured data from enterprise IT systems; it is equally adept at making sense of unstructured information found in documents, reports, stakeholder interviews, and internal communications. By harnessing the power of the proprietary SLM and the deep contextual knowledge of Hackett Intelligence, XT™ can analyze this complex mosaic of information to produce coherent, high-quality transformation outputs. These outputs include sophisticated strategic recommendations, detailed process redesigns, and data-backed business cases for change. The platform essentially automates the laborious and time-consuming phases of data collection and analysis, allowing consulting teams to accelerate directly to the critical work of strategy formulation and implementation planning with greater accuracy and confidence.
The introduction of a platform like XT™ fundamentally alters the traditional rhythm and workflow of a business transformation engagement. In the past, consulting teams would spend a significant portion of project timelines manually gathering, cleansing, and analyzing data to form a baseline understanding. This front-loaded effort often delayed the development of actionable insights. XT™ collapses this timeline dramatically, enabling a more dynamic and iterative approach to transformation. Consultants can now test hypotheses, model different scenarios, and validate strategic directions in near real-time, fostering a more agile and responsive engagement model. This accelerated pace not only reduces project costs but also allows organizations to pivot more quickly in response to new information or changing market conditions. As a result, the platform empowers consultants to move beyond the role of data analysts and function as true strategic partners, focusing their efforts on guiding clients through the complex human and organizational dynamics of change.
AIXelerator for Software Implementation
AIXelerator™ represents a next-generation project delivery platform that seamlessly integrates The Hackett Group’s proprietary AI into the entire software implementation life cycle. It is designed to be a comprehensive support system that guides projects from their inception to their conclusion and beyond. The platform’s capabilities span every critical phase, beginning with initial discovery and requirements gathering, where it can help identify key business needs and translate them into technical specifications. It continues to provide support through the subsequent stages of solution design, build, and testing, ensuring that development aligns with strategic objectives. During deployment and go-live, AIXelerator™ helps manage the transition and mitigate risks. Furthermore, its functionality extends to ongoing monitoring post-implementation, providing a continuous feedback loop for optimization. This end-to-end integration aims to streamline core project activities, enforce best practices, and ensure a higher degree of consistency and quality throughout the complex delivery process.
The practical impact of AIXelerator™ on technology engagements is substantial, addressing many of the common pitfalls that lead to project delays, budget overruns, and suboptimal outcomes. By automating routine tasks and providing AI-driven guidance at each stage, the platform significantly reduces the potential for manual error and improves the overall quality of deliverables. This enhanced efficiency accelerates project timelines, allowing organizations to realize value from their technology investments sooner. Moreover, the platform’s emphasis on standardization and best-practice adherence ensures that implementations are robust, scalable, and aligned with long-term business goals. The integration of ongoing monitoring capabilities transforms software implementation from a one-time event into a continuous improvement cycle. This allows for proactive issue resolution and performance optimization, ensuring that the technology solution continues to deliver maximum value as business needs evolve over time, thereby fostering greater agility and a stronger return on investment.
A New Operating Model for Consulting
Driving Efficiency and Higher-Value Work
The strategic shift to this AI-augmented operational framework is projected to deliver significant and tangible outcomes, with the firm claiming a potential reduction in the effort required for transformation and technology engagements by up to 40%. This remarkable efficiency gain is not merely about cost savings; it fundamentally reallocates the most valuable resource in any consulting project: the time and expertise of its consultants. By automating the intensive processes of data gathering, synthesis, and initial analysis, the platforms enable project teams to advance much more rapidly to the development of actionable recommendations and strategic planning. Consequently, consultants are liberated from routine, data-intensive tasks and can dedicate a greater portion of their focus to higher-value activities that demand uniquely human skills. This includes exercising nuanced strategic judgment, engaging with stakeholders to build consensus around change, and crafting complex, outcome-driven implementation road maps that navigate the intricate realities of an organization.
This evolution redefines the role of the modern consultant, moving them further up the value chain from information processors to strategic change agents. In this new model, the AI platforms act as a powerful force multiplier, amplifying the intellectual capacity and strategic insight of the human teams. Consultants can leverage the platforms to explore a wider range of scenarios, validate hypotheses with greater rigor, and present findings backed by a depth of data that would be impossible to achieve manually in a similar timeframe. Paulo Dominguez, the Chief AI Innovation Officer, affirmed this vision, stating that this is not simply new technology but a new operating model for how teams engage with clients and deliver work. This perspective underscores a fundamental change in the consulting workflow, one where human expertise is augmented, not replaced, allowing for a deeper and more impactful partnership with clients focused on solving their most complex and pressing business challenges.
Redefining Market Position
The launch of XT™ and AIXelerator™ was more than just a product announcement; it was a deliberate strategic move that solidified The Hackett Group’s identity as a “Gen AI strategic consulting and digital transformation firm.” By completing its suite of proprietary, AI-powered platforms, the firm has effectively woven generative AI into the fabric of its operations, moving beyond advising on technology to leveraging it as a core component of its own service delivery. This integration of a unique intellectual property asset, “Hackett Intelligence,” provided its AI tools with a level of deep industry context and performance-based insight that generic, market-available AI models simply cannot replicate. The announcement signaled a definitive shift in the professional services industry, highlighting a new paradigm where proprietary AI, trained on domain-specific data, has become a core enabler of client value and a key competitive differentiator that will likely set the standard for others to follow.
