From Executing Process to Managing Outcomes: The Agentic AI-enabled Future

Global Business Services (GBS) operations are rapidly evolving as Intelligent Automation, Generative AI, and now Agentic AI expand what can be digitized and transformed. We have already seen credible examples of end-to-end (E2E) “touchless” operations in parts of finance, procurement and service delivery, alongside “teams of bots” that manage tasks across platforms.

Agentic AI adds the ability to reason for steps that are not strictly rules based and offers better coordination capability.

We are now gradually shifting from executing process steps to managing outcomes by governing automated, agent-enabled operations.

This new operating model raises the bar on foundational capabilities. Touchless delivery requires different skills: managing data quality, knowledge base, monitoring, and analytics – as well as more focus on process expertise and different approaches to risk mitigation.

Knowledge base management is a good example of this change. GBS has always maintained extensive documentation, but in the primarily human-managed operation it was rarely used for delivery; humans prefer talking to a colleague rather than reading long process documents. AI agents use documentation for every task execution: policies, exception playbooks, step by step guides, prior resolution/examples. Suddenly, we really need to have our documentation in order, manage conflicting information, and keep it up to date. 

At Takeda, we use close to 100.000 knowledge articles to answer basic L1 queries. The GBS organization is best positioned to manage this knowledge base, however it requires deliberately building and resourcing the capability.

From a workforce perspective, the number of FTEs required to deliver the same scope is likely to continue decreasing overall. The more dramatic change, though, is in what retained FTEs will do. Future roles become less function-specific (e.g., invoice processing) and more capability-based:

·       Digital Operations Specialists
·       AI & Automation Experts
·       Data & Analytics Specialists
·       Business Partners
·       Global Process Champions
·       Knowledge Managers
·       People Experience Specialists
·       Risk and Compliance Partners
 
Overall, this positions GBS to take on new scope because its core capabilities are function-agnostic. Just as importantly, it can create a more exciting future for our teams. 

The key will be aligning with enterprise priorities so we can deliver more value using our position as a global organization with the ability to deliver globally, at scale.

READ MORE: The Post FTE-based Service Delivery Model

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