How GenAI and other tech empower teams to increase efficiency, enhance employee and customer experiences, and drive new value.
Estimated read time: 3-4 minutes
“Do more, with less” has long been a business mantra. It used to be shorthand for wringing costs down to every paperclip. Today, it’s more about finding and unlocking value in unlikely places.
Take the finance function at global business service (GBS) organizations. For years, finance’s primary domain was policing efficiencies and shaving costs. No longer. Thanks to enabling technologies, finance is now creating incremental value across organizations—and ensuring that new value falls to the bottom line.
A key enabling technology is generative AI (GenAI), a rapidly evolving type of AI that is changing how work is delivered by the finance function and, at the same time, reinventing the service delivery model (SDM) for maximum employee engagement and sustainable growth.
GenAl is not the sole driver of SDM transformation. Rather, it’s accelerating how organizations leverage technology, talent, and processes to enhance the impact and value of service work.
Let’s look at the new operating model for finance within GBS organizations—and how it creates value every day.
GBS organizations are fast becoming enterprise transformation offices, focusing on scalability and growth through data and information flows rather than transactions and processes. This creates value in three ways:
Organizations improve ROI by aligning costs with business strategies. Enabling technologies, such as like AI, automate complex tasks and streamline handoffs, freeing up finance teams to focus on innovation.
Organizations move from value preservation to value creation by adopting centralized data and analytics for predictive insights and enhanced decision support. In doing so, they turn useful information into high-value assets.
Companies strengthen employee engagement and customer loyalty with superior service experiences, integrating internal teamwork and external customer interactions across all functions. Well-designed user interfaces make the services easier to deliver and consume.
With a thoughtful approach and consistent execution, a GBS transformation can facilitate business outcomes, not service agreements. It also helps creates seamless, scalable service delivery and an agile, on-demand workforce that can “run with the machines” and feed new ideas back into the organization.
The next-generation SDM transcends isolated GBS organizations, centers of excellence, and global capability centers. It leverages an integrated and distributed working model using technology and innovative processes.
It’s not the work that changes, but how it’s distributed, shared, and enhanced. The primary objective for SDM transformation is to ensure the appropriate work reaches the appropriate people in the right parts of the world, based on a flexible yet tightly integrated global SDM.
GenAI becomes part of a comprehensive technology and process ecosystem that allows the finance team to produce more detailed reports, statements, forecasts, budgets, and analyses with fewer errors and in less time. It also enables cross-enterprise capability hubs and the transfer of complex activities to areas of the organization with specialized skills and knowledge.
An SDM transformation with GenAI also unlocks new approaches to leveraging talent for value creation. Finance teams can more easily recruit, train, and leverage personnel with business acumen, digital fluency, data literacy, adaptability, and creative problem-solving skills. These attributes are crucial for thriving in the evolving landscape.
New operating models will also foster collaboration, storytelling, intellectual curiosity, and the application of AI ethics and governance to business challenges.
One good example of GenAI in action is how we use it ourselves at KPMG.
Our solution, KPMG GenAl for Advisory, is an essential framework for our finance and accounting shared services center. KPMG GenAl for Advisory has significantly reduced the labor needed to analyze and comment on financial statements for our partners and board of directors. We also use it for primary analysis of financial and operational data, freeing up finance professionals to focus on secondary analyses and refining commentaries.
Turn insight into opportunity with unique perspectives and actionable insights addressing the burning issues atop the C-suite agenda. Delivered monthly.
This framework helps clients harness GenAI by focusing on measurable value and accelerated adoption, using a workforce-centric mindset and role-based strategy. This helps ensure that CFOs and other business leaders can drive impactful changes. This holistic approach empowers companies to think big and act boldly, leaning into sustainable growth and value creation.
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