Navigating Outsourcing Supplier Strategy: Key Trends

The Navigating Outsourcing Supplier Strategy report examines how organizations are reshaping outsourced services portfolios amid global volatility, cost pressures, and generative AI advances. Rather than large-scale supplier ecosystem overhauls, enterprises are optimizing portfolios to drive innovation, improve consistency, and mitigate risks.
Across IT and business process services, dissatisfaction with supplier performance – especially around risk distribution, delivery reliability, and modernization capability – is fueling rebalancing and consolidation. Organizations are streamlining vendor landscapes, eliminating overlaps, and doubling down on partners with strong modernization, automation, and domain depth. In F&A and procurement, transactional work is shifting to platform-led providers, while high-value analytics remains with specialists.
Generative AI has emerged as the single strongest force influencing future portfolio strategy. Buyers are reassessing incumbents based on their ability to deploy AI and are onboarding AI-native partners to fill capability gaps, modernize service models, and create unified performance layers across diverse vendor ecosystems. Cost remains a foundational priority, but innovation, performance consistency, and geographic risk mitigation increasingly determine supplier staying power. Organizations are adopting multi-city delivery, re-evaluating emerging talent hubs, capping supplier concentration, and splitting essential processes to build resilience.
The document concludes with guiding questions and success factors to help sourcing leaders evaluate supplier mix, strengthen governance, and enable confident portfolio transformation.