EXL Claims 94% AI Deployment Success as Enterprises Move Beyond Pilots

The business process management industry has spent decades helping enterprises reduce costs and improve efficiency through outsourced operations. But according to Madhavi Dahanukar, Executive Vice President and Global Head of Operations at EXL, artificial intelligence is beginning to change the industry's fundamentals.

In an interaction with AIM, Dahanukar said EXL’s evolution into a data and AI-focused company reflects a broader shift underway across enterprise operations.

“Today, 60% of revenue is driven by data and AI,” she said, arguing that AI is no longer being deployed as a standalone technology layer but is increasingly being embedded into operational workflows.

The transition comes as enterprises grapple with a challenge that has become increasingly common since the rise of generative AI: moving projects beyond experimentation.

Asked why many AI initiatives struggle to scale, Dahanukar said organisations often approach AI as a technology exercise rather than an operational one.

“The broader industry struggles with scaling AI because most initiatives remain confined to pilots, often disconnected from real workflows, enterprise data, and execution environments,” she said.

The NASDAQ-listed company claims it has achieved a 94% AI deployment success rate by focusing on workflow integration and operational execution rather than isolated use cases. However, the company did not disclose how the metric is calculated.

To illustrate the approach, Dahanukar pointed to customer examples. She said EXL helped a large US healthcare payer redesign its prepay operations, resulting in a 4.5-fold shift in savings mix towards prepay and more than $600 million in annual savings. In another engagement, she said a leading UK retailer recorded an improvement of around 200 basis points in Net Promoter Score after deploying agentic AI-led customer service operations.

The growing discussion around AI is also forcing service providers to confront questions about the future of traditional outsourcing models.

When asked whether generative AI risks commoditising business process services, Dahanukar rejected the idea that companies should focus on preserving conventional BPM structures.

“EXL is not attempting to protect traditional BPM; it is actively redefining it into AI-led operations,” she said.

She went further, arguing that the sector itself is changing.

"BPM is not being protected; it is being replaced by a more intelligent, AI-native model of operations."

The workforce implications of that shift remain a subject of debate across the industry.

Asked which roles are likely to be most affected by AI over the next five years, Dahanukar said repetitive and rule-based operational work would likely decline. However, she argued that AI would create new categories of work rather than simply eliminate jobs.

According to her, roles such as AI output reviewers, domain data annotators and human agent managers are already beginning to emerge. As enterprise workflows become increasingly automated, employees are expected to spend more time supervising systems, interpreting outputs and managing exceptions rather than executing routine tasks.

“The nature of work is shifting from execution to judgment, orchestration, and exception management,” she said.

At the same time, enterprises are becoming more demanding about AI investments.

Dahanukar said the client conversation has changed significantly over the past year, moving away from experimentation and towards measurable business outcomes.

“Twelve months ago, the dominant conversation was about possibility, what AI could do. Today, clients are asking a fundamentally different question: what has it actually delivered, and what will it cost me to get there?” she said.

“The era of unconstrained experimentation is over.”

According to Dahanukar, organisations are no longer willing to fund AI pilots that fail to deliver tangible results.

“What is consistent across all clients is the end of tolerance for pilots that go nowhere,” she said. “Enterprises are not looking for proof-of-concept. They are looking for proof-of-scale.”

While AI may reduce the amount of routine operational work performed by humans, Dahanukar argued that it also expands the scope of higher-value services centred on decision-making, workflow management and outcome ownership.

The New York-headquartered company reported first-quarter ending March 31, 2026 revenue of $570.4 million, up 13.8% year-on-year. Adjusted operating margin expanded to 20.5%, compared with 20.1% in the same period last year. Following the quarter, the company raised its full-year revenue guidance to between $2.30 billion and $2.33 billion in 2026.

Insurance, and healthcare and life sciences were EXL’s two largest industry segments in the first quarter of 2026. While insurance generated $194 million in revenue, healthcare and life sciences contributed $151.9 million. Healthcare reported a gross margin of 45.3% during the quarter, compared with 37.7% for insurance.

EXL employs more than 67,000 employees across six continents.