An outsourcing research firm, built on primary evidence.
In the first half of 2026, 850 of the people who deliver agentic AI outsourcing described 150 live engagements at Tier 1 financial institutions — and 37.33% of them had already been canceled. Akholi is the research-led advisory firm built on that record.
Research-led, and built to be checked.
Akholi is a research-led advisory firm for agentic-era outsourcing, service engagements, and global capability centers, established 13 years ago. Its public authority rests on primary evidence rather than opinion — and on one dataset in particular: the 2026 study of 150 agentic AI outsourcing engagements at Tier 1 financial institutions, told by the 850 people who deliver them.
From that record the firm draws a single governing claim, stated at the strength the evidence supports and no further. In the engagements studied, outcomes track the conditions the buying institution builds rather than the deals it signs. Failure there is institutional in origin rather than technical, and the determinants sit within the institution’s own authority to change. That last clause is the whole posture: the levers are in the institution’s hands. The finding is agency, not fault.
Akholi exists to help boards and C-suites act on it — to diagnose the conditions that decide an engagement, to learn the operating discipline the agentic era demands, and to run the hardest engagements with a firm that has counted the failures. The Report is the evidence; the Academy and the Practice are how institutions put it to work.
The author.
Phil Hatch is a 30-year senior executive and authority on global outsourcing. Hatch built and led ManpowerGroup’s outsourcing business unit. He advises Tier 1 banks, outsourcing vendors, Fortune 500 companies, and governments on making large-scale outsourcing work and preparing global labor markets for job growth. His focus now is the hardest version of that problem, transitioning the outsourcing industry to prepare for artificial intelligence.
He is the author of The State of Agentic AI Outsourcing at Tier 1 Financial Institutions, a study based on 150 engagements and 850 people who deliver them. The report continues a line of research he began 2 decades ago into why outsourcing succeeds or fails.
As chief executive of Ventoro, later acquired by ManpowerGroup, he built the workforce research function for a major investment bank and helped it open its offshore captive center in Hyderabad. Hatch has been a board advisor for numerous major outsourcing firms, including Infosys and Wipro, on industry direction, customer management, risk, and the labor economics behind their client engagements. For more than a decade, he has assessed the AI readiness of Fortune 100 companies, including leading an enterprise AI rollout for a global technology firm where the binding constraint proved to be data rather than technology.
Alongside this work, Hatch advises governments and international organizations, among them the World Bank, the ILO, UNDP, and the African Development Bank, on workforce and economic development. Most recently, the US State Department asked Hatch to return to Ukraine as a senior advisor on economic and labor policy reform.