The Decisions GBS Leaders Are Sitting With Right Now. This Is Where They Get Answered.

Most GBS leaders arrive at Summit carrying the same open questions they've been turning over for months. What problem the redesign is actually meant to solve. Which legacy processes should be retired rather than carried into the new model. Whether the roles on the org chart still match the work the business needs done. None of these are new questions in June. They're the open items every GBS conversation this month keeps circling back to, and most are still unresolved by the time delegates walk into the room in September.

That's not a criticism of the leaders carrying them. These are genuinely hard decisions, and the conditions to resolve them properly rarely show up in the middle of a normal working quarter. What's been clear in every conversation we've had recently is that the decisions don't get easier by waiting. They get easier by talking to someone who's already made them.

That's the actual value of a room full of GBS peers, and it's worth being specific about why.

The decisions are the same ones, function to function

Every GBS leader we talk to believes their situation is somewhat unique, and in the specifics, it usually is. But the underlying decisions repeat with remarkable consistency. What problem the redesign should prioritise when multiple stakeholders want different things. What to retire rather than carry forward into a new operating model. Who has the authority to resolve disagreement once the redesign work actually starts. Which roles need to be rebuilt for the work that's coming rather than the work that's already leaving.

These are the questions we've watched stall real programmes when nobody answered them early enough, not abstract ones, and they're the same questions that come up first when a GBS leader from one organisation compares notes with a GBS leader from another. The conversation that happens at a Summit roundtable, where someone says they ran into exactly that eight months ago and explains what they did, compresses months of trial and error into an afternoon.

That compression is the actual value proposition. Not the keynotes, although the content is strong this year. Not the networking, in the generic sense that word usually gets used. The value is specific: a room full of people who've already made the decision you're sitting on, willing to tell you what worked and what didn't.

What this works better in a room that in a deck

A lot of GBS guidance lives in frameworks, whitepapers, and vendor decks. All of that has its place. But frameworks describe the general shape of a decision. They don't tell you what it actually felt like to make the call when the data was incomplete and two stakeholders disagreed and the timeline was tighter than anyone wanted.

That detail only comes from someone who's lived it. And the only place that detail surfaces reliably is a conversation with a peer who's already been through the version of the problem you're facing now. That's structurally different from reading a case study, because you can ask the follow-up question. You can push on the part that doesn't quite apply to your situation and get a real answer instead of a generic one.

This is why the Summit's format matters as much as its content. The fireside formats and the smaller breakout conversations are built around exactly this kind of exchange. The Process track, the People track, and the Technology track each surface a different category of decision, but the mechanism is the same throughout the day: practitioners talking to practitioners about decisions they've actually made.

What to bring

If you're attending, the most useful thing you can do beforehand is get specific about which decision is actually open for you right now. Not a vague sense that you need to think about AI, but the actual unresolved question. Is it the problem definition for a redesign that's stalling? Is it a role that needs rebuilding and you don't know what to rebuild it into? Is it a governance question that's been quietly unresolved for two quarters?

Walking in with that question sharpened is the difference between a day that feels interesting and a day that actually moves something forward. The leaders who leave with a decision made are the ones who came in knowing which decision they needed to make.

Early bird closes this month

Early bird registration for AGOS GBS Summit 2026 closes at the end of June. The Summit takes place on 10 September at Sheraton Petaling Jaya, the ninth edition of the annual GBS strategy event in Malaysia, bringing together GBS leaders, multinational organisations, and digital transformation stakeholders from across the region.

The questions are already on the table. The room where they get answered is three months away.

Register for AGOS GBS Summit 2026 → AGOS GBS Summit 2026 | Global Business Services

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ABOUT AGOS ASIA

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.