Sarthak Brahma is the Founder & CEO of HEX Advisory Group (“HEX”), a coterie of senior sourcing practitioners that helps enterprises and PE portfolio companies drive efficiency across the People, Process, Technology, Software, Service Providers, and Locations spend that powers enterprise operations.
Sarthak founded the benchmarking and sourcing practices at Everest Group and WGroup, consolidated them under Wavestone, and led the combined footprint until 2022, when he bootstrapped the acquisition of Wavestone’s benchmarking assets, HealthCheck IP, and India operations to launch HEX.
HEX advisory spans outsourced IT, BPO, and GCC engagements helping clients benchmark, renegotiate, and govern vendor contracts and sourcing strategy across a bouquet of services including IT-BPS Opportunity Assessments, Business Case Modeling, Outsourcing Advisory, Benchmarking, Vendor Contract Health Checks, GCC and Shared Services Setup & Run Optimization, Change & Program Governance, and VMO Design & Optimization.
Sarthak is based in NYC, where HEX is headquartered, and has executed 250+ sourcing and benchmarking mandates globally as the founder of these capabilities at Everest Group, WGroup, Wavestone, and now HEX Advisory Group.
Q: With over 25 years of experience, your career has spanned major leadership roles at global firms like Everest Group and WGroup, where you became a recognized authority in IT-BPO sourcing and complex benchmarking. Who is Sarthak Brahma, and what were the defining moments in your career that shaped your vision for a more transparent, data-driven advisory model?
Sarthak Brahma: That is all true. Having spent 25 years in the industry, I have realized exactly where the “gray zones” and conflicts of interest exist. As an advisor, choosing the ethical path over financial gain is often difficult for large firms under quarterly pressure. When the opportunity arose to form HEX, I realized that without that heavy overhead, I could choose to stick to doing the right thing. This became our mantra: we don’t play in the gray zone or take money from the sell-side to curry favor. Additionally, I learned that if you are armed with the right data, you don’t have to run in circles. Since my first practice in 2008, I’ve understood that data creates clear roadmaps. I consolidated the intelligence I built at Everest, WGroup, and Wavestone into the HEX Index® platform to drive autonomy and definitive, accelerated decision-making for our clients.Our recent work demonstrates this impact clearly; when the CIO and CTO of Southwest Airlines announced their Global Innovation Center in Hyderabad, they chose HEX as the independent advisor sitting at the table with the Chief Minister of Telangana, not a Big Consulting logo.
Q: Traditional consultancies often thrive on client dependency, a model where the client needs constant oversight to maintain progress. In contrast, you’ve championed a model focused on client autonomy, designed to give the power back to the enterprise. What was the specific market gap or aha moment that led you to launch HEX, and how does your approach disrupt the typical consulting relationship?
Sarthak Brahma: Advisors traditionally love clients who remain dependent on them indefinitely. When you pay for advice, you are paying for data, playbooks, and experience. While data and templates are easy to codify, experience was always locked in the gray matter. Large firms exploited this asymmetry of information, charging premiums because they supposedly had the most brainpower. My “aha” moment was realizing that AI and platforming can now crack those monoliths. We can now train AI agents to think and solve problems the way an expert does. This breaks down consulting silos and makes information ubiquitous. The advisor as a middleware wedge becomes 80% irrelevant because technology bridges the gap. HEX is a technology company rooted in sourcing legacy, but we disrupt the status quo by replacing that old wedge with a seamless, data-driven platform.
Q: In IT-BPO sourcing, data is often opaque or based on outdated surveys. HEX Advisory Group utilizes the HEX Index®, which you describe as a definitive source of real-world transaction metrics and contractual insights that go beyond standard analyst reports. How does having access to the HEX Index® change the power dynamic for a CEO or CFO during high-stakes vendor negotiations?
Sarthak Brahma: Any data is only as good as its currency and cogency. Having real-world precedents arms you with an upper hand before you even sit at the table. Negotiation isn’t about wielding power; it’s about knowing what you know so you don’t give things away blindly. We provide contemporary intelligence that makes contracts equitable, which is vital because lopsided deals eventually fail. Unlike firms where benchmarking is a separate, opaque P&L, our clients see the same faces negotiating the deal as they see demoing our platform. That line of sight creates total accountability. Furthermore, because our platform is AI-powered, we’ve moved past backdated reports that are months old by the time they are drafted. A CFO can now pull a real-time cheat sheet or query a live feed to get an immediate answer. That is the beauty of technology-led consulting in 2026.
Q: One of the most striking claims HEX makes is the ability to effectively collapse the traditional six-month procurement and sourcing cycle into a streamlined six-week process. In an era where “execution velocity” is a competitive advantage, this speed is unheard of in traditional advisory. How is HEX able to move so much faster than the industry standard without sacrificing the depth or quality of the final agreement?
Sarthak Brahma: The answer is technology and data. Six-month cycles were only required because of the old school theater of multi-round RFPs. When technology can synthesize and dispel facts quickly, I already know what the final solution and pricing should look like. We work toward a definitive endpoint rather than a “blind circus.” For a major airline, we collapsed an 18-month consolidation roadmap into nine weeks by instituting a marketplace. We put their requirements on one grid, benchmarked them via our platform, and told providers they had one round to comply or fall off. As a buyer, you aren’t playing a guessing game anymore. Chasing the unknown takes months; chasing the known takes weeks. We collapse the cycle by keeping facts on our side.To facilitate this, we launched “ASK HEX,” an agentic advisor that allows C-suite and hands-on operators to prompt rate benchmarks and simulate budgets in real-time. It effectively collapses a six-figure consulting engagement into a single, voice- or chat-enabled session.
Q: You’ve recently spoken about an extinction-level event for enterprise software, suggesting that Agentic AI is making traditional UI/UX and software moats redundant. How should enterprises rethink their multi-year software contracts right now to avoid overpaying for legacy technology in an AI-first world?
Sarthak Brahma: AI levels the playing field by removing the barriers to intelligence. Historical domination based on having the biggest data centers or networks is over because anyone can now plug into an ocean of information. Traditional UI/UX is also becoming defunct; if I need a data story, I can simply tell the AI to generate a chart in the format I prefer. The clean dashboard is no longer a selling point because consumption is now person-dependent. Enterprises today struggle with silos and dormant licenses, but AI can provide a real-time view of utilization if tethered correctly. I suggest viewing software procurement as a service construct. Instead of managing licenses yourself, hand that obligation to a third party whose job is to exert sourcing muscle. Don’t look at software as just software, make it a service tied to commercial milestones and AI-driven governance.
Q: There is a massive trend of firms moving toward GCCs in hubs like India. While most focus on technical infrastructure, you’ve argued that GCC success is actually a people-first endeavor centered on talent scaling. What is the most critical factor in balancing technical stability with the right-to-hire leverage required for a successful GCC?
Sarthak Brahma: Let me start with the uncomfortable truth: 90% of GCCs today are capacity plays dressed up as capability strategies. Enterprises squeeze their vendors for cost, shift those volumes into a GCC, and call it transformation. Capacity reshuffling and feeding a GCC the same diet of capacity doesn’t make it a capability center.
Enterprises must first ask what they are trying to solve for. A GCC in 2026 shouldn’t look like one from three years ago. In this agentic era, you must determine how much of your workload can be “agentified.” If 100 people’s work can be done by 60 after automation, you then identify which of those 60 roles are “true core” IP that you must own. You give the non-core work to a technology operator and keep the core talent for yourself. The problem is that most firms treat a GCC as a siloed project rather than a broader GBS (Global Business Services) transformation. They focus on the “finger” and forget the “hand.” Many current GCCs are just “bloated fat cats”. They hire for headcount, not for capability density. And then they wonder why their offshore center feels like an expensive extension of a vendor relationship they were trying to escape.
The firms getting this right are the ones who treat the GCC as a living operating model, one that agentifies continuously, scales selectively, and keeps only what is genuinely irreplaceable in human hands. That is the balance. Not headcount versus automation, but clarity on what you are building and the discipline to build only that.
Q: A unique aspect of Hex Advisory Group is your rejection of the pay-to-play model, meaning you avoid research subscriptions and vendor sponsorships to maintain total objectivity. Why was it vital for you to remain vendor-agnostic, and how does this independence impact the trust you build with Private Equity firms and Global 2000 clients?
Sarthak Brahma: Corporate greed often pushes advisors into a death spiral where they must feed more partners and bigger paychecks. When firms go public or have massive overhead, they start playing both sides, taking money from vendors to put them on top-right research rankings, then telling buyers to hire those same vendors. That bastardizes the process. HEX is entirely bootstrapped, which gives us the autonomy to be whistleblowers and call out this conflict of interest. We don’t take vendor money for seats at the table. To remove human bias even further, we use our platform. If a client asks me for a recommendation, I might have a personal bias, but the AI-based HEX Index® does not. It provides results based purely on requirements, devoid of human emotion or pay-to-play perceptions. That unfiltered transparency is our biggest differentiator.
Q: You’ve helped clients realize savings between 10% and 34% on massive portfolios by targeting indirect spend across people and technology that others often overlook. For a CEO looking at a $100M+ outsourcing portfolio that feels stagnant, what are the first three levers you pull to find hidden value or renegotiate terms?
Sarthak Brahma: Savings depend on environment maturity; a messy, unoptimized portfolio has a different trajectory than a clean one. We first baseline your “current corpus” of people, spend, and volumes. We then use two primary levers: Price and Quantity. The Price lever involves indexing your cost structures to the present day, for instance, treating once-premium skills like SAP as the commodities they now are. This cleanup alone can save 10% to 15%. The Quantity lever is about transformation; we use AI and automation to remove unnecessary workloads, which can save another 20% to 40%. Finally, we look at modernization to ensure those efficiencies stick. Every dollar is simply Price times Quantity. We optimize the price and then right-size the quantity through technology. If an environment hasn’t been touched by technology in years, reaching 60% savings is a very real possibility.By targeting these hidden efficiencies, we’ve moved from being a vendor to a trusted partner for C-suites at firms like American Airlines, Southwest Airlines, Avis Budget Group, and Mars’ Anicura, proving that speed and depth can coexist when powered by the right AI-native model.
Q: How can readers find out more about HEX Advisory Group and you? Any case studies or white papers to share?
Readers can explore our case studies, white papers, and live HEX Index ® insights at hexadvisory.com. We regularly publish on the GCC, agentic AI, and sourcing economics themes we’ve discussed here. For C-suite leaders wrestling with these decisions in real time, ASK HEX is now live. You can query benchmarks and simulate scenarios directly. And I’m always open to a direct conversation on LinkedIn.
