Why HQ Is Asking Every GBS Leaders About AI – And What They Expect to Hear

Something shifted in the last twelve months. The conversation between GBS leaders and corporate headquarters stopped being about whether AI was coming and became about what you have done with it.

If you lead a GBS function across southeast asia, you have probably felt this already. A request for an update. A slide deck due before the quarterly review. A question that sounds simple but is not: what is AI actually delivering for us?

Most GBS leaders are not ready to answer that question well. And the reasons why tell you something important about where the bigger problem actually sits.

The pressure is structural

Headquarters is not asking about AI out of curiosity. They are asking because the numbers demand it. According to The Hackett Group’s 2025 Key Issue Study, GBS workloads are set to increase by 11% this year while budgets grow by only 7%. That gap has to be bridged somehow, and AI has become the assumed answer.

That assumption has moved fast. In 2024, 42% of GBS Centre ran AI pilots. 63% of those early adopters reported measurable gains. So from HQ’s perspective, the case is made. The question now is execution: where are the results, and when can we see them at scale?

That is a reasonable question. The uncomfortable truth is that most GBS functions are not in position to answer it.

The accountability gap is closer to home than most realise

The AGOS-Roland Berger GBS in the Digital & AI Era report surveyed GBS organisations across ASEAN and found that only 40% track KPIs to measure the success of their AI and digital initiatives. That means six in ten GBS functions are running AI programmes without a clear way to know if they are working. Let alone a credible way to report it upward.

At the same time, 74% of GBS leaders in the same survey said their leadership teams have a clear vision for integrating AI. Vision is not the problem. The gap between vision and measurable execution is.

That is precisely what HQ is now probing. And most GBS leaders are walking into those conversations with activity – not evidence.

Source: AGOS-Roland Berger GBS in the Digital & AI Era, 2025

The wrong question is driving the wrong actions

Here is what is actually happening inside many GBS functions right now. When HQ pressure lands, the typical response is fast and visible – tools selected, pilots launched, use cases packaged into a slide deck, and it all looks like progress until someone asks what actually changed in the business because of it.

The hard answer: often, not much.

The reason is not that the tools are bad. It is that the work started in the wrong place. Most organisations jumped straight to technology without first asking a more fundamental question: are the processes we are about to automate actually worth automating?

When AI is deployed on processes that are not properly understood, the result is not efficiency. It is the same dysfunction running faster – more mistakes, more rework, and a much harder conversation with HQ six months later.

What HQ is actually asking

When headquarters asks about AI, they are not asking about vendors, platforms, or proof of concepts. They are asking three things: what problem did it solve? What did it cost? What did we get back?

Those are process questions before they are technology questions. The only way to answer them confidently is to have started with the process – understood it, challenged it, and redesigned it where necessary, before deciding what to automate and why.

Most GBS functions skipped that step. They are now trying to work backwards, and it shows.

The shift that changes the outcome

The GBS organisations generating real AI returns are not the ones that moved fastest. They are the ones that started in the right place by mapping how work actually flows, not how it looks on a process document, but how it moves through systems, teams, and daily exceptions.

From that foundation, the automation decisions become clear. What to automate, in what order, at what level of investment stops being an open question and becomes a structured plan with a defensible answer for HQ.

This is not a slower approach. It is the only approach that produces an answer worth giving.

The question you should be able to answer

The next time headquarters asks what AI is delivering, the best answer is not a list of tools deployed or pilots underway but a clear explanation of which processes were redesigned, what is now running differently, and what that means in numbers.

If you cannot give that answer today, the issue is not your AI strategy. It is that you have not yet asked the question that comes before it.

AGOS ASIA works with GBS organisations across southeast Asia to close exactly that gap, starting with process and building toward outcomes that hold up in any HQ conversation. Visit agosasia.com