What Is GBS For? The Mandate Beyond Cost, Scope and Headcount

Małgorzata Jasińska-Dyla | Helprise 

At the ABSL Forum 2026 in Budapest, AI was everywhere. But after listening to two days of discussions about transformation, talent, technology, outsourcing and the future of GBS, I came away with a question that was not really about AI at all: if work can increasingly be performed by different combinations of people, technology, agents, partners and locations, what will the enterprise still need GBS for? 

For more than two decades, the expansion of Business Services was relatively easy to observe. More processes moved into centres, geographical scope increased and headcount grew. Standardisation, scale, labour arbitrage and productivity created a compelling economic case. Those advantages still matter, but what I heard repeatedly in Budapest was that the next expansion may look very different. It may come less from absorbing additional activities and more from taking responsibility for how enterprise outcomes are delivered, how capabilities are connected and how the operating model keeps adapting. 

From accumulating scope to earning a mandate 

Traditional GBS design usually began with an existing organisation. Finance, HR, Procurement, IT and other functions retained their basic structure, while selected activities were consolidated, standardised and transferred into a shared delivery model. Over time, automation and analytics improved the model, but the underlying question remained largely unchanged: which additional work can move into GBS?

Several discussions at the Forum suggested that this may now be the wrong starting point. We were challenged to imagine designing a large enterprise from scratch. Few organisations would deliberately begin by creating thousands of roles inside separate functional towers and only later ask which of those activities could be centralised. They would start with what the business needs to achieve and design the delivery model around those outcomes. 

This distinction is more consequential than it first appears. Asking where work should sit assumes that the basic shape of the work already makes sense. Asking how an outcome should be delivered leaves open much more fundamental choices: which steps are still necessary, which capabilities should sit together, where technology can change the economics of execution and where accountability needs to cross functional boundaries. 

I have written separately about what this means for the redesign of work itself in When Technology Outpaces the Organisation. The more specific question for GBS is what happens to its mandate once that redesign is no longer constrained by the old functional map. 

End-to-end ownership is really about authority 

“End to end” has been part of the Business Services vocabulary for years. What struck me in Budapest was how often the discussion moved beyond process maps and into questions of organisational authority. 

A value stream can be drawn relatively easily. Giving one person meaningful accountability across Finance, Procurement, Technology, Operations or Marketing is much harder. Genuine end-to-end ownership can require someone else to give up part of a team, budget, decision right or functional territory. This is where an apparently technical operating-model discussion becomes a leadership and power discussion. 

The BAT example illustrated one way of addressing the problem. Its GBS organisation has moved away from traditional functional towers towards end-to-end services and user journeys. Importantly, domain credibility was not expected to appear simply because the organisational chart changed. Senior people from the functions moved into the new model: an experienced marketer leading Brand-to-Consumer, a Procurement veteran leading Procure-to-Pay and functional experts taking responsibility for outcomes from within GBS. 

That matters because one of the traditional barriers to an expanded GBS mandate has been trust. Functions are understandably reluctant to hand strategic work to an organisation they perceive primarily as a delivery centre. Bringing genuine domain leadership into GBS changes that equation. It allows process ownership and business expertise to sit together rather than forcing the organisation to choose between them. 

The implication is that future GBS models may need to compete for leadership capability, not only for transactional scope. A larger mandate cannot be created through process transfer alone. It has to be earned through expertise, credibility and the authority to make decisions across organisational boundaries. 

The captive-versus-outsourcing question is giving way to delivery architecture 

The Forum also made the traditional captive-versus-outsourcing debate feel increasingly incomplete. The more relevant question is becoming: what combination of internal capability, external expertise, technology and flexible capacity gives the enterprise the strongest model? 

BAT took a particularly bold route by transferring a large GBS organisation to a strategic provider. What was interesting was not simply the outsourcing decision, but the optionality it created. The partner brought technology investment, scale and capabilities that would have been difficult to replicate at the same pace internally. The service portfolio then expanded into areas such as Procurement and Marketing that would once have sat outside a conventional GBS discussion. 

Rolls-Royce described a different architecture. It is building strategic GCC capability in Poland and India while using partners to support strategy, technology, transition and execution. In one complex commercial process, external expertise is being used to operate the current service, support the development of a new technology platform and provide additional capacity while the future internal team is recruited and trained. 

These are not competing proofs that outsourcing or captive is superior. They point instead to a more useful distinction between ownership and access at enterprise level. Some capabilities need deep institutional ownership. Others can be accessed through a partner more efficiently, particularly where that partner can spread investment, specialist expertise and learning across multiple clients. 

In that sense, the real design objective is not captive or outsourced. It is optionality: having enough internal ownership and enough external leverage to change the model when the business requires it. 

The strategic question therefore becomes less ideological. What does the enterprise need to understand and control itself? Where can an external ecosystem provide leverage? And how easily can that architecture be reconfigured as business needs, technology and economics change?

The economics of partnership will have to change with the work 

Once delivery architecture changes, commercial models eventually have to change as well. 

Traditional outsourcing economics were built around a relatively stable relationship between service volume and labour. FTE numbers, rate cards and SLAs were logical tools for pricing and managing a model in which more work generally required more people. AI and automation weaken that relationship. 

A provider paid primarily for maintaining labour can eventually face an uncomfortable incentive if the client’s objective is to remove effort. Several discussions in Budapest therefore moved towards contracts that place more weight on capability, productivity, business outcomes and continuous improvement. HighRadius took the argument furthest, presenting an outcome-based model under which the provider takes more of the implementation risk and participates financially in the results generated. 

Pure outcome pricing will not replace every existing model, nor should it. Many services will continue to need transparent capacity and service measures. But the direction is important. As technology changes the relationship between work and labour, buying more efficient labour becomes a less complete definition of partnership. 

This creates a challenge for providers themselves. They may need to cannibalise parts of today’s labour-based revenue in order to create tomorrow’s value proposition. The final Forum debate made the broader point very clearly: organisations that protect an existing revenue stream too aggressively can lose the next one entirely. 

For the service industry, that may mean moving progressively from selling capacity towards combining expertise, technology, operational responsibility and measurable outcomes. 

Run and transformation are beginning to converge 

One of the most interesting ideas came from TCS: in more advanced operating models, the traditional separation between performing work and transforming work begins to weaken. 

Historically, operations ran the process while a transformation programme changed it. Transformation had a project team, a roadmap and an implementation date. Once the programme ended, the new model was handed back to BAU. 

AI makes that separation harder to sustain because the operating environment itself changes continuously. Teams working with AI-enabled processes are not simply executing work. They are identifying exceptions, observing system behaviour, adjusting workflows, discovering new opportunities for automation, improving knowledge and changing how responsibilities are divided between people and technology. 

In that environment, transformation is no longer something that happens to operations every few years. It becomes part of how operations functions. 

This has significant implications for GBS. Continuous improvement has always been part of the model, but continuous operating-model adaptation is more demanding. It requires people who can run a service and understand how to change it; governance that can approve and absorb frequent change; and technology, data and business expertise close enough to the work to learn from what actually happens. 

The future cycle may therefore look less like run → transformation project → new run state and more like run → learn → improve → redesign → run again. Business Services is potentially well placed to host that cycle precisely because it already combines scale, process knowledge and operational discipline. 

The real strategic asset may be horizontal visibility 

TCS used the idea of an “integrated spine” to describe the potential role of a GCC. That framing captures something important about the structural advantage Business Services can have. 

A multinational enterprise is fragmented by design. It contains countries, products, functions, legal entities, technology platforms, business units and external partners. Each part has its own targets and optimises its own piece of the system. Few parts of the organisation have a reason to look horizontally across all of them. 

GBS can. 

That horizontal perspective may become more valuable as AI makes local optimisation faster. Finance can improve its own process, Procurement can optimise its own metrics, Customer Service can automate its own interactions and Marketing can deploy its own agents. Each initiative can be individually successful while the end-to-end experience becomes more fragmented. 

The distinctive contribution of GBS may therefore be less about owning every process and more about seeing the connections between them. Where does one function’s optimisation create cost elsewhere? Where does a local technology decision break an enterprise handoff? Where are different teams solving the same problem independently? Where could one capability be reused rather than rebuilt? 

This is not automatically a role GBS deserves. It depends on the quality of its process knowledge, data, domain expertise and relationships with the business. But if those conditions exist, cross-enterprise visibility may become one of the strongest arguments for a broader mandate. 

Value has to be visible in the language of the enterprise 

A broader mandate also requires a different value conversation. Green SLAs and declining unit costs remain useful, but they are rarely enough to justify strategic influence at board level. 

Several Forum examples showed GBS organisations deliberately moving towards measures the enterprise already cares about. At Merck, the conversation was shifting from efficiency to effectiveness and towards the contribution of Accounts Payable and Invoice-to-Cash to free cash flow. State Street described the ambition to move from being an “order taker” to an “order maker” and deliberately located global transformation leadership in Poland. 

Rolls-Royce provided perhaps the clearest example. Its digital capability in Bangalore analysed large volumes of engine data to identify whether airline customers were complying with engine-washing requirements. That work was not valuable because an analytical process became faster. It affected contractual value, engine performance, safety and ultimately the economics of the aftermarket business. 

The common denominator across those examples is not process maturity. It is the ability to link a Business Services capability to an enterprise outcome. 

That suggests a much higher standard for the next phase of GBS. The question is no longer only whether the service met its SLA, but what changed for the enterprise because that capability existed. 

Resilience adds another dimension to the mandate 

The discussions in Budapest also made clear that enterprise value is no longer only a combination of cost and growth. Geopolitical volatility, cyber risk, regulation and increasing dependence on technology are making resilience a more important operating-model concern. 

Historically, resilience in Business Services often meant having backup capacity or more than one location. Future resilience is broader. Concentration can exist in a country, a provider, a cloud platform, an AI model, a technology stack or a critical specialist capability. The final Forum debate repeatedly returned to the importance of optionality: organisations need to understand where dependence creates unacceptable vulnerability and where the cost of maintaining alternatives is justified. 

This does not imply duplicating everything. Maximum redundancy would be economically irrational. It does mean that delivery-model design and resilience strategy are becoming harder to separate. 

The same applies to location. The question is increasingly not which single location is optimal, but which combination of locations and capabilities gives the enterprise the right balance of expertise, cost, proximity, resilience and flexibility. I explored the talent side of this shift separately in When Headcount Is No Longer Capacity: Rethinking Talent in Business Services. 

So what is GBS actually for? 

The future mandate will differ by organisation. For some, GBS may own selected end-to-end processes. For others, its strongest role may be as a capability platform, an integration layer across functions or the orchestrator of a broader ecosystem of internal teams, partners and technology. What seems less sustainable is defining its importance primarily through organisational territory: headcount, service catalogue or the amount of work transferred into the model. 

A more useful test may be what the enterprise becomes better able to do because GBS exists. Does it transform faster, see across functional boundaries more clearly, deploy technology at scale, access scarce capability and adapt its delivery model as conditions change? Does it become more resilient? Does operational knowledge translate into better business decisions? 

For more than twenty years, Business Services proved its value by moving, standardising and improving work. Its next chapter may depend on whether it can help the enterprise continuously redesign how value is created and delivered.