The Vital Importance of AI for Global Business Services (GBS)

The shared services and global business services world is characterized by constantly pushing for improved performance. The challenge is – the moment you succeed, the performance targets for the following year shoot up! The issue has always been to do the same thing faster, better, cheaper, more effectively, and, more recently, in a way that offers purpose and equity to the value chain.

In this space, technology becomes a key driving force. Barbara Hodge, Global Online editor of SSON and Host of SSONext, sits down with Matt Wright, Senior Vice President, Customer Success, at AppZen Inc. to break down what GBS leaders should be thinking about. Matt is a seasoned leader with over 26 years in the field of customer success management. Matt’s passion is working with organizations that are focussed on deriving as much value from technology platforms as possible to serve their customers better.

How technology has helped push the shared services world forward

A confluence of forces has contributed to the fast growth of shared services and GBS: global networks have reduced the cost of communications to nearly zero; the internet has connected businesses by enabling companies to share processes and information more quickly and inexpensively; and, importantly, new and emerging technologies have been leveraged to drive improved performance of back-office functions.

Matt Wright explains: “Technology that shared services professionals are working with, and have worked with historically, have brought major improvements to their lives. But they have generally required significant investments, maintenance, oversight, and adaptation to the natural ebbs and flows of business transactions that shared services professionals have to contend with on a day-to-day basis.” 

Can artificial intelligence add value, and play a bigger role?

You truly cannot talk to any technology provider today, without them bringing up their approach to artificial intelligence (AI). Matt describes it as “almost like table stakes”, where everybody says they have AI, and people are interested but uncertain of the operational applicability for their businesses. Matt and his team focus on helping professionals really understand what artificial intelligence is and how it adds value to their business. “If you look at what artificial intelligence is doing, AI has the processing capacity to have awareness of every single data element on an invoice in pure perfection, no ambiguity,” he explains. “The invoice number has a value; the ship to location has a value; the product items listed on the invoice have values. And the ability to compare that pattern against a library of patterns is huge. In this way, we can build a much more enhanced level of institutional knowledge than the human mind could possibly achieve. So, in bringing an AI-first approach to data problems, we're actually going to have the opportunity to create more and more autonomous processing – far more than is possible even when leveraging the human mind at its fullest,” says Matt.

The factors that drive true success for businesses choosing to use AI

AI depends on some key factors to succeed. It requires recognizing, reading, digesting, and internalizing patterns and quantities. Matt lays it out: “There is the historical data that's required to seed the engine, so that it can have a basis to perform predictions against patterns. Remember, these products learn on the fly. We have customers that have gone live with a year's worth of history imported into our engine, and they come out of the gate with a relatively high autonomous rate. We also have organizations that have gone live with zero historical data, because they've shifted platforms, and the history is no longer relevant with the new platform. In the latter case, there are no patterns that can be recognized. It just takes a little bit longer to get to that level of automation. The reality is that there is a constant introduction of variety in shared services and GBS – supply chains are not static. What the historic data is doing is giving you a jumpstart and helping the business define how quickly you can plan to get to high levels of autonomous processing.”

How can modern GBS firms build a business case for AI, as early adopters?

GBS leaders would do well to remember that in the early stages of any AI project, up to six or eight months, it just might take a little bit more human effort to provide the full business case and the possible learnings. The core business case to be made lies in the benefits that artificial intelligence can offer companies, including: 

• Efficiency and productivity gains
• Improved speed of business
• New capabilities and business model expansion opportunities
• Improved and intuitive customer service
• Improved qualitative monitoring
• Reduction of human error
• Much better talent management

What is autonomous finance?

‘Autonomous Finance’ speaks to a particular outcome that many GBS are focussed on to cut down processing time of repetitive tasks. It refers to the number of transactions that can flow through an environment without requiring any human intervention at all, autonomously processed by technology with zero human intervention. This means that some fixed values are applied consistently and accurately across an entire invoice to enable it to be processed without a human. While we may still be some distance from mass adoption of Autonomous Finance, placing a greater emphasis on understanding where our talent base can benefit from the use of AI is a great idea for GBS leaders.

Enjoy the audio medium? You’ll find a lot more detail in this full discussion between Matt Wright and Barbara Hodge:

📌This article is brought to you by AppZen. AppZen is an AI platform for modern finance teams. They overhaul the way finance teams work by automating spend approvals and providing insights that help companies reduce spend, comply with policy, and streamline process.📌