The Roles Your GBS Will Need by 2027. Most Functions Haven't Started Hiring for Them.

Chang Te Sheng's recent piece, 'Every Job in Your GBS Needs an Upgrade. So Does Every Person in It.', opened a question we've been sitting with since: if most job descriptions were written for a different operating environment and the hiring signal, they send no longer reflects the role, what should the upgraded version actually look like?

What we haven't seen enough of is the prescription. What do the upgraded roles actually look like? The functions that are ahead of this have gone beyond rewriting existing descriptions. They're creating roles that didn't exist in their organisations two years ago and positioning existing people to grow into versions of their current roles that look materially different from where they started.

These GBS roles that will define 2027 are already operating in leading functions in Malaysia and across ASEAN, but most org charts haven't caught up yet.

What GBS roles in 2027 actually require

The clearest signal of where GBS careers are moving comes from the finance and accounting function, because that's where AI adoption has moved fastest and where the role shifts are most visible.

The financial analyst role that most GBS functions have today is built around producing outputs: reports, reconciliations, variance analyses. The AI-Augmented Finance Business Partner, that's replacing it in advanced functions is built around interpreting those outputs and advising the business on what they mean. The technical work of production has shifted to automated systems. The human value is in the judgment that follows.

That shift sounds incremental until you sit with it. It means the skills that made someone a strong financial analyst (accuracy, process adherence, volume capacity) are less differentiating than they were. The skills that make someone a strong Finance Business Partner (connecting financial data to a business narrative, advising a stakeholder under time pressure, knowing which number matters and why) are the ones that create value in an AI-augmented environment.

The same pattern runs across the function. At a recent event in Penang on the future of GBS careers, Chang Te Sheng mapped these transitions for an audience of professionals and students navigating exactly this shift. The pattern across finance and accounting was consistent:

Current Role	Transition Role
Financial Analyst	AI-Augmented Finance Business Partner
Invoice Processing Administrator	Intelligent Automation Specialist
Accounts Payable (AP) Analyst	Process Automation Lead
Finance Systems Analyst	ERP/AI Solutions Engineer

These transitions don't happen overnight. But the functions that are moving are the ones where leadership looked at what automation was doing to the existing role portfolio and started redesigning deliberately, rather than waiting for the gap to become a performance problem.

What the transition actually requires

Looking at what the people making these transitions successfully have in common, three things come up consistently.

The first is digital dexterity: not expertise in any specific tool, but the agility to adopt new tools as they arrive without needing the environment to stabilise first. RPA, analytics platforms, AI co-pilots: the people who add value quickly in these environments are the ones who can orient themselves in a new system and start contributing before the next iteration rolls out.

The second is data intuition, the shift from crunching numbers to finding the story behind them. An AI system can process ten thousand invoices and flag anomalies. The person who adds value is the one who can look at those flags and understand which one's matter for the business decision the CFO is about to make. That requires a different relationship with data than most finance roles have historically demanded.

The third is the ability to act as a problem-solving partner: bringing structured thinking to conversations that involve Sales, Operations, and Marketing, not just Finance. The boundary of what a GBS finance professional is expected to contribute has expanded. The ones who are growing into the new version of their role are the ones who've been willing to operate across that expanded boundary rather than staying in the lane their old role defined.

The ASEAN context

Malaysia is the world's third most competitive GBS market. The multinationals operating GBS functions here are actively looking for talent that can drive what's being called Value-Based Transformation: the shift from cost efficiency as the primary value proposition toward business partnering and AI-augmented decision support.

The most competitive functions are already hiring for these GBS roles in 2027, not waiting for 2030. The roles described above are live job descriptions in organisations operating in this market. The question for every GBS professional in the region is whether they're building toward the profile those descriptions are looking for, and for every GBS leader, whether the people in their function have the conditions to make that build.

The functions that get this right over the next eighteen months will have a talent architecture that compounds. The ones that don't will keep finding themselves slightly behind the capability curve, not because the people are wrong, but because nobody mapped the transition and started moving toward it deliberately.

The roles are here. The question is whether your function is building toward them.

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AGOS Asia is an AI-first digital GBS transformation partner operating across ASEAN. We work with finance and shared services leaders to rethink, redesign, and rewire their operating models for the AI era. AGOS GBS Summit 2026, the ninth edition, takes place on 10 September at Sheraton Petaling Jaya. Visit agossummit.com for more info.

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