Scaling GBS excellence: Tips from the top on driving value with AI in Shared Services

The emergence of enterprise AI, and specifically agentic AI, signals the end of Global Business Services (GBS) as we know it. While humans won’t be out of the GBS loop anytime soon, their role is already changing as AI becomes a power plant for reimagining and scaling GBS excellence. Change isn’t just coming, it’s here – and we’ve all got to adapt.

This was just one of the takeaways from Celosphere 2025’s GBS panel discussion, which featured experts from Deutsche Telekom, Michelin, and Johnson Matthey. Experts who, like most of the session’s audience, face daily pressure to generate ever-greater returns at ever-lower cost across their organizations’ Shared Service functions.

The lively Q&A didn’t just cover the great AI debate. The panel also discussed their organizations’ wider experiences using GBS teams to standardize, simplify, automate, and transform traditional ‘back office’ functions (like HR, Finance, IT, Procurement, Logistics, and Customer Services) into strategic enablers and value drivers. At scale.

They shared glimpses of the key principles, building blocks, and technologies that are making this GBS transformation possible. Here are some of the highlights.

Which comes first: data quality or digitalization?

The session opened with an Information Age chicken-and-egg dilemma: to successfully scale GBS impact, do you start by establishing solid data foundations or by digitizing core processes? While the panel experts were aligned on most issues, there was a distinct divergence of opinion on this most fundamental of questions.

Timo Romero Soria, Head of Business Analytics, Process & Data Management at Deutsche Telekom was adamant that “You’ve got to get the data sorted out first. Always focus on getting your data straight. If the data is off, you’re just automating noise.”

While accepting that software can significantly underperform without good data, Michelin’s GBS Process & Data Director, Cécile Latour, prioritized it slightly differently. “You’ve got to digitalize all processes,” she said. “Software is eating the world and you have to be a software-driven company. It’s the way to accelerate your GBS services.”

Whichever is prioritized, the panel made it clear that both data and digitalization are essential steps on the path to scaling GBS. There was also a consensus on another key point: the value of using Celonis Process Intelligence to optimize processes in these early stages of scaling GBS . Romero Soria explained how important the Celonis Platform had been to Deutsche Telekom’s GBS team, allowing it to identify the root causes of persistent data issues in its P2P cycle.

Latour echoed these sentiments, describing how process mining helps organizations to understand pain points in daily activities – and to pinpoint where to concentrate their efforts to accelerate GBS scaling.

How do you drive alignment as you scale?

Whatever the planned catalysts, enhancements, and strategies organizations develop for scaling GBS excellence, they don’t operate in a vacuum. With this in mind, the panelists also explored the challenges businesses face when scaling up the scope and impact of GBS teams:

• Ensuring all efforts to streamline, standardize, or simplify core functions stay aligned with overall business strategies.
• Ensuring they stay focused on solving everyday business problems, so functional teams remain invested in the GBS transformation journey.

So, how do GBS leaders stay in lock step with their strategic KPIs, and convince colleagues they’re here to help, while spearheading often uncomfortable change, such as the automation of tasks or roles?

According to Mariano Andrade, director at sustainable technology giant Johnson Matthey, the key to overcoming both challenges is positioning scaling as a data-driven joint effort between departmental and GBS teams. “You keep alignment and engagement by sharing responsibility for strategic outcomes,” he said. “We’re all in it together.” Just as teams across Finance, HR, CX, or Supply Chain are relied on to provide expert input for scaling GBS successfully, they need to be accountable for transformation outputs.

These conversations are a lot easier, the panel agreed, when opportunities for creating value by scaling GBS excellence are founded on accurate, transparent, and objective business data.

“We use Celonis to support these business decisions, and as a way to consult with the business,” said Romero Soria. “[The Celonis Platform] gives the teams a seat at the table, helping the business overcome issues each team is facing and helping them solve customer problems.”

It’s much easier to win ongoing buy-in when everyone can see the rationale for scaling GBS initiatives, and the value they’re delivering. And the Celonis Platform provides this transparency. It connects each team’s work to overall strategic outcomes and provides an objective means for measuring transformation impact.

How will agentic AI redefine GBS?

Agentic AI solutions are flooding the GBS space, and there’s a growing sense that this marks the end of the model as we know it. A recent Deloitte report, for example, describes the role of agentic AI in driving a “radical shift in how GBS is positioned and the value it offers”, with GBS becoming “a catalyst for enterprise transformation rather than a by-product of it, fostering innovation and driving continuous improvements”.

As mentioned earlier, Celosphere’s expert GBS panel all agreed that agentic AI is likely to have a significant impact on GBS. “Yes, it’s the end of GBS as we know it,” asserted Andrade. “GBS is evolving fast with the affordability of the agentic tooling.”

“Of course AI is top of mind and a key part of ongoing GBS strategy,” concurred Latour. “Organizations are looking at implementing agentic AI across the piece to deliver better experiences for both employees and customers alike.” She pointed to Customer Services as an example. AI agents are being used to surface instant, cross-system insights that help human teams provide customers with faster, more personalized, and more informed levels of service.

With agentic use cases within GBS multiplying, are we approaching the point where humans will be out of the loop? Overall, the panel thought not – at least not for the foreseeable future. Over time, however, there was a clear expectation that agentic AI solutions would be able to take on increasingly complex GBS interactions, reducing the need for, or redefining the role of, human interventions. GBS teams move from being operators to being orchestrators—the cortex of the organization.

The future of scaled GBS excellence, it seems, will be AI-driven. Which means enterprises need to act now, building capabilities to adapt to the changing environment. They’ll need to upskill and reskill employees to take advantage of enterprise AI, and understand cross-business customer interactions. They’ll also need to make sure AI solutions are built upon solid data foundations and business context.

The faster that GBS teams can adopt and adapt to these new ways of working, the faster they will be able to deliver GBS excellence at scale.

For further information, take a look at how Deutsche Telekom is using Celonis Process Intelligence to optimize its P2P cycle.