2025 Predictions from SSON’s Global Advisory Board (Part One)

SSON's global advisory board is full of some of the best and brightest people in the shared services and outsourcing business. Each year we ask them for their predictions on the challenges, forces and themes that will shape the upcoming year. See part one below and let us know how many you agree with!

Steve Rudderham, Head of GBS, Carrier
Land-lording will receive more focus from organizations and GBS Leaders will be leaned upon to provide the model.
 
Sandy Khanna, VP Finance Operations, Mars Global Services
Cost pressures will continue to increase, and our industry's focus will need to be on value creation, such as working capital.
 
Acceleration of the next ERP hype cycle - S4 - will force us to ensure we sweat our technology assets better and drive maniacal process standardization
 
Angela Mangiapane, Former President, Mars Global Services 
Costs continue to be table stakes, but cash will be pivotal. The GBS that can provide further cost reduction, more cash but with great clarity of purpose (to motivate those within a GBS), an experience that continues to engage the business's employees, and foresight to provide the rest of the business with proactive strategies and a competitive advantage will rise to the top.
 
The big question - can a GBS be a competitive advantage for a business? It can, if it keeps the focus on what the business is all about.  Rather than looking at "costs", should we look at RoI? What opportunities is the rest of the business missing if it does not invest in extracting value from GBS? Should we look to ourselves as the innovation engine of a company, especially for CPG where innovation must go beyond product?
 
We will need to extract more from less and therefore GBS can play also a transformative role in productivity. With all the hype on GenAI and agents, can GBS be the one who shows the way?
 
AJ Wijesinghe, SVP Global Business Services, Ecolab 
Multi-functional GBS could help play a critical role in delivering enterprise-wide transformation.
 
In the world of AI where leadership will look to deploy tools like CoPilot, GBS could play a critical role by using our standard approach of centralization, standardization, and data governance to front-end AI while driving adoption to realize the value.
 
GBS could play a wider role in driving and championing true end-to-end process ownership to take O2C to Lead to cash and P2P to Source to Pay. We are uniquely positioned to take the lead in this. This will ultimately play a critical role in the enterprise to generate cash flow.
GBS will become a platform ready to help take cost out in systematic and controlled manner of the entire G&A stack when the enterprise needs it.
 
Viral Chhaya, Former GBS Leader, Kaiser Permanente
As the availability of a relevant talent pool in diverse geographies gets established and with unrelenting cost pressures, GBS will move from back-office / middle-office functions to the backend of front-office and business-value-enabling functions. This means not just SG&A anymore, but more design-hubs in auto/manufacturing, more remote drug research labs in pharma, more remote nursing care, diagnostics and pharma management in healthcare, more covenant monitoring and regulatory environment management in banking, GBS will be the engine of AI-development and deployment and the Data-Insights hub for the Enterprise - In short, more Power to GBS!
 
Sanjeev Rastogi, CEO, Global Capability Enterprises, Adani Enterprises Ltd
Emerging technologies such as generative AI, deep-tech and quantum computing are set up to create a million jobs by 2025 in the shared services/GCC industry, the IT industry and shared services industry is likely to grow by 10-12%. The key skills required in the next months will be Java, cybersecurity, and dev ops and a lot of reskilling and upskilling will happen in GCCs for talent development. In addition, demand for some niche skills in AI and Analytics will see 30-40% growth.
 
Chris Gunning, Global Finance Transformation Leader, Nielsen IQ
Spare a thought for the small guys. The non-Mega-GBSs! 2025 will see a continued uptick in the number of smaller companies in the $1BN-$5BN revenue ranges make their first foray into the world of Shared Services and GBS. This is a result of C Suite members, who had previously been at some of the larger MNCs, moving to instill the culture and the benefits that a centralized model can bring. Some of these organizations will start small, but yet still leverage the underlying concepts of foundational GBS.
 
Many GBS and SSOs will realize (or be told!) - that they are not doing anywhere nearly enough in the world of stakeholder engagement and customer-centricity.  The importance of SERVICE EXPERIENCE will rise with prominence and doubling down on stakeholder management will need to take place.
 
Working Capital will be on the lips of every GBS and CEO leader - as they drive insights and improvement on working capital for their organizations.
 
We will see some of the small niche and boutique Consulting and BPO firms, specializing in GBS/Shared Services, continue to take work and deals away from the larger big 4 and normal BPO players by offering a more personal and more competitively priced business outcome.
 
As much as we all love Co-Pilot, and we will all continue to embrace and use it - leaders will secretly get fed up seeing the same words, phrases, and examples in communications, PowerPoints, emails, and messages - and will want to send their associates on Shakespearean and James Joyce reading and writing courses for a bit of originality and creativity in the written word.
 
Carla Sarti, Global Business Services Executive, ex-Lear Corporation 
GBS will continue to be the focal point in driving digital transformation. Coupled with owning the data cleansing/standards and more focus on end-to-end process ownership will really drive value (outside of cost reduction) for companies.
 
Gavin Ifield, VP and Head of GBS, Aecom 
Global political unrest will drive decisions on sourcing and entity structures; China and India for instance and generally China, the US, and the rest of the world.
 
BPOs will gain market share with AI and an ability to better articulate their value proposition, but flounder behind competing priorities to maintain revenue streams. Competing saas and rep products incorporating AI will slow progress as companies try to navigate too many AI options without a clear strategy. Everything will look shiny, but the investment is large and prohibitive.