Artificial intelligence (AI) will not make Global Business Services (GBS) organisations obsolete; instead, it will make them more strategically important as enterprises deploy AI agents at scale, Boston Consulting Group (BCG) said in a report released on Friday.
The report argued that while
AI agents could automate workflows and reduce transactional work by 30 to 50 per cent over the next three to five years, they cannot replace the governance, accountability, data ownership and end-to-end process management required by large enterprises.
Instead, companies should reposition GBS units as centralised “AI Control Towers” responsible for overseeing AI deployment, enterprise data and cross-functional operations, it said.
GBS organisations are centralised units that handle business functions such as finance, human resources, procurement and supply-chain operations for large enterprises, often across multiple geographies.
“The enterprises that win in the AI era will not be those that fragment operations across functions and hope agent swarms self-coordinate,” said Rajiv Gupta, Managing Director and Senior Partner at BCG.
He added: “They will be the ones that build a centralised AI Control Tower with the governance, data, and accountability to deploy AI at scale and sustain it. That is what a transformed GBS delivers.”
Key findings
The BCG report stated that enterprises that transform their GBS operations with AI could shrink their delivery footprint by 25 to 35 per cent while strengthening governance and enterprise-wide AI deployment capabilities.
However, it cautioned against dismantling GBS structures and returning operations to individual business functions. Function-owned AI agents operating without centralised oversight could create fragmented accountability and value leakage, particularly in processes that cut across multiple departments, the report stated.
It further claimed that the long-term cost of dissolving GBS organisations, including restructuring expenses, recurring inefficiencies and eventual re-centralisation, could reach four to seven times annual GBS operating costs over a decade.
“The biggest misconception in boardrooms today is that AI reduces the need for GBS,” said Matt Marchingo, Managing Director and Partner at BCG.
He added: “As agentic AI scales, governance, data integrity and end-to-end accountability matter more, not less.”
Why it matters for India
The report is particularly relevant for India, which hosts one of the world’s largest Global Capability Centre (GCC) and GBS ecosystems.
According to BCG, as agentic
AI scales across finance, human resources, procurement and supply-chain functions, GBS organisations in India are well-positioned to evolve from service-delivery centres into enterprise AI orchestration hubs.
The report argued that the challenge for companies is not whether to transform these organisations, but whether to lead that transformation before AI-driven disruption forces it.
