From Fire-Fighting to Innovation: How Services-as-Software Powers Outcome-Based Innovation 

By Kalyan Kumar, Chief Product Officer, HCLSoftware

Amid the rise of agentic AI, the enterprise technology landscape is quietly transforming as the boundaries between software and services rapidly blur. Organizations are adopting autonomous AI agents to streamline workflows, automate tasks at scale, and accelerate business outcomes.

Gartner predicts that by 2028, 33% of enterprise software applications will embed agentic AI – up from less than 1% in 2024 – enabling 15% of day-to-day work decisions to be made autonomously.

This paradigm shift is prompting businesses to rethink success through enhanced experiences, operational efficiency, and simplified complexity, driving continuous improvement, sustained growth, and measurable value.

It’s Time for a Fundamental Reset

Enterprises face a pivotal moment: traditional service models no longer suffice. A majority of leaders are actively reassessing their vendor relationships, with 72% targeting IT services contracts and 62% focusing on software and SaaS agreements for renegotiation.

This signals a strategic shift away from incremental fixes toward embracing Services-as-Software — a customer-centric paradigm that goes beyond conventional pricing and paves the way for value co-creation and outcome-based engagements, enabling companies to balance the risk and reward to maximize returns on digital investments

In a market often constrained by vendor lock-in and SaaS bloat, the Services-as-Software model emphasizes key quality metrics such as transparent total cost of ownership (TCO), clear ROI, and risk mitigation to help CXOs better evaluate their software investments.

This framework drives tangible business outcomes, empowering organizations to balance growth with cost efficiency through enhanced TCO visibility. For instance, autonomous agents in IT Service Management can be evaluated using outcome-focused metrics such as customer satisfaction (CSAT), resolution times, and speed-to-market — providing compelling insights into value delivery and operational performance.

Similarly, in the high-stakes security operations, where SecOps teams face alert overload, agentic AI offers a major advantage. It autonomously analyzes, categorizes, and prioritizes security incidents, providing triage notes in real-time to empower informed responses. By emphasizing agent accuracy against human benchmarks, reducing time-to-resolution, and ensuring compliance, this approach delivers measurable outcomes that drive tangible business value.

Agentic AI’s Impact on IT Spend

In the face of these strategic market shifts, IT budgets are being fundamentally restructured. As organizations accelerate agentic AI adoption, CXOs must carefully balance budget constraints with the imperative to achieve measurable business outcomes. This challenge is further amplified in today’s complex enterprise landscape, characterized by multi-cloud, multi-vendor environments where vendor lock-in and data dependencies persist.

Enterprises cannot simply rip and replace to give way for new systems – making the need for  interoperable, outcome-focused solutions more critical than ever.  Moreover, traditional business processes remain largely deterministic and rules-based, while functions are probabilistic.

The Intelligence Economy requires interconnected systems — spanning data, processes, and intelligent agents—that can orchestrate workflows seamlessly across agents, robots, and humans, and adapt dynamically in real time, all underpinned by strong human governance.

From IT Spend to Business Value: The Services-as-Software Revolution

So, how can enterprises optimize IT budgets and fully capitalize on agentic AI? The answer lies in building the right foundation —  a key imperative for achieving real business impact. 

Looking ahead to an agentic-powered future, HCLSoftware outlines an intelligence fabric of Services-as-Software via Agents of Action  – a customer-centric, value-driven, pragmatic, outcome-based approach. Instead of completely reimaging operations, it provides a  practical pathway to outcome-based transformations at scale. 

Anchored by the XDO Blueprint — which integrates Xperience, Data, and Operations — it provides a realistic roadmap for transformation with Agents of Action underpinned by human-in-the-loop governance to deliver business outcomes continuously, intelligently and invisibly. 

Building the XDO Enterprise: Real-World Agentic AI Use Cases

Let’s explore how real-world implementations of agentic AI can revolutionise enterprise operations across the three critical domains.

1. Reimagining experience (X):  Marketers and CX leaders often struggle with fragmented workflows that reduce productivity and campaign effectiveness. Multi-agent AI platforms unify predictive and generative AI to streamline fragmented marketing workflows. This enables automated data analysis, insights generation, and customer segmentation via natural language, boosting campaign effectiveness and productivity.

• Fueling data insights (D): Picture a scenario where a user needs to understand how monthly active users (MAUs) and churn correlate over a period of two years. AI agents democratize data by automating complex analyses like correlating MAUs and churn over years. By quickly identifying patterns and recommending retention strategies, AI agents can replace weeks of manual data science work with self-service analytics, delivered in minutes.

• Reinventing service management (O):  IT service management teams contend with overwhelming alert volumes, and lengthy resolution times.  In this scenario, autonomous incident resolution uses three AI agents: Diagnosis (detects anomalies), Resolver (executes fixes), and Incident Manager (orchestrates workflow/escalates). This reduces mean time to resolution by handling most incidents without human intervention and continuously improving response rate.

• Transforming SecOps (O): HCL AppScan RapidFix exemplifies how agentic AI transforms security operations from reactive to proactive intelligence.  Through two autonomous agents —SAST Autotriage for vulnerability assessment and SAST Autofix for generating code fixes for issues detected, the agentic-powered system accelerates triage by reducing manual efforts, cuts remediation time and addresses security backlogs, giving immediate and tangible ROI to companies. 

The Gulf Advantage: Accelerating Value Through XDO Blueprint

The XDO Blueprint drives a powerful flywheel effect – enhanced experiences yield richer data, which optimizes operations. This is not a linear progression but a compounding cycle that accelerates organizational capabilities over time.

This continuous improvement model is especially critical in regions with ambitious transformation agendas. In the Middle East, where visionary initiatives like ‘We the UAE 2031’ call for sustainable, long-term transformation, the XDO Blueprint offers a strategic framework perfectly aligned to meet these demands.   

Building Pragmatic Sovereign Solutions 

The cornerstone of successful AI-driven transformation is responsible implementation. While a raft of solutions promise to deliver the silver bullet that brings us closer to AI utopia, true business impact is achieved by establishing a solid foundation grounded in explainability, governance, and data sovereignty.

In the Gulf region, where data privacy and ethical AI usage are paramount, the XDO Blueprint integrates compliance at the core of its architecture —making it a strategic enabler, not an afterthought. This ensures that innovation moves forward without compromising on trust.