Gen AI in GBS

Redefine Global Business Services With Gen AI

The Hackett Group^® provides end-to-end Gen AI services for global business service (GBS), covering everything from strategic consulting and AI readiness assessment to solution design, development and deployment, helping enterprises unlock measurable value across GBS functions. Built for enterprise scale, our Gen AI solutions automate complex processes and support data-driven decision-making, enhancing overall operational reliability.

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Impact of Gen AI in GBS

43%

Reported improved productivity.

46%

Measurable quality improvements.

43%

Achieved reductions in operating costs.

31%

Enhanced customer or employee experience.

37%

Reduced full-time equivalent (FTE) requirements.

Source: Key Issues Study, The Hackett Group^®, 2026.

Our Gen AI services for GBS

Our AI consulting and development services for GBS cover everything from planning to solution development. We help you leverage Gen AI to improve GBS functions, increase efficiency and support better decision-making.

Gen AI strategy development

Our approach involves close collaboration to shape a Gen AI strategy that drives impact across priorities such as planning, analysis, compliance, and reporting. From evaluating your existing capabilities to identifying high-impact use cases and crafting a scalable roadmap, our process ensures responsible AI integration aligns with your business goals.

AI readiness and gap assessment

We conduct a comprehensive assessment of your organization’s readiness for Gen AI adoption, evaluating critical dimensions such as business strategy, business process intelligence, enterprise application, data, agentic AI orchestration, governance, infrastructure, and people and cultural enablement. The assessment identifies capability gaps and outlines clear remediation steps, ensuring your GBS operating environment is secure, compliant, and scalable for AI-driven transformation.

GBS use case identification and prioritization

Using Hackett AI XPLR^™, we assess your existing GBS workflows, data quality, and AI readiness to identify and prioritize high-impact Gen AI opportunities across shared services. Each potential use case is evaluated based on impact, feasibility, and alignment with your business objectives, enabling targeted investments that improve accuracy and enhance decision-making across planning, reporting, and compliance.

Data engineering

We build an enterprise-grade data foundation using scalable pipelines on platforms like Databricks and Snowflake. Our end-to-end approach transforms raw GBS data — such as service requests, productivity metrics, and cost allocations — into AI-ready assets while establishing governance frameworks that enable advanced analytics, automation, and decision intelligence.

Custom Gen AI solution development

We develop enterprise-grade Gen AI solutions tailored to GBS use cases such as invoice processing, supplier onboarding, and service desk ticket triage, etc. The process begins with a proof of concept (POC) to evaluate technical feasibility, data readiness and business relevance. Once validated, we develop a minimum viable product (MVP) to test performance in the real world. We then develop the full-scale solution and integrate it with your existing GBS systems.

AI agent development for GBS operations

We design, build, and run AI agents that automate high-volume work across finance, procurement, human resources (HR), information technology (IT) service desk, supply chain, and customer operations. These agents operate within your existing GBS systems to reduce manual workload, improve accuracy and boost efficiency across key GBS workflows.

Monitoring and optimization

We offer post-deployment monitoring, maintenance, and upgrades to ensure your Gen AI solutions for GBS remain reliable and relevant. As technology and business needs evolve, we continuously track performance across shared services and implement timely enhancements, helping you drive innovation, ensure reliability, and keep pace with change.

RESEARCH

Achieve Cost Leadership: How US Top Performers Use an Agentic Strategy to Slash SG&A Costs

Selling, general and administrative (SG&A) costs for U.S. enterprises have surged to 14.3% of revenue — the highest in five years — as 62% of companies struggle to contain expenses despite slowing growth and easing inflation.

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Featured insights

2025 European SG&A Cost Study and Scorecard

Research

Elevated Training Investment Contributes to 49% Lower Recruitment and Staffing Process Costs

End-to-end Gen AI enablement across GBS functions

Gen AI is revolutionizing how global business services operate, eliminating manual effort, accelerating decision-making, and elevating service outcomes. The Hackett Group^® delivers bespoke solutions that drive efficiency and impact across key GBS processes and subprocesses. Here’s how we enable Gen AI-powered transformation across core GBS areas:

Finance and accounting

Our Gen AI solutions automate routine finance activities, helping reduce manual work and improve accuracy. We apply Gen AI to collect, validate, and process invoices, reconcile ledgers, and streamline approvals — accelerating close cycles and reducing errors. Our Gen AI solutions can detect anomalies in financial data to flag potential compliance issues and fraud risks early. It can also generate recommendations to optimize working capital, improve cash flow forecasting, and support timely, audit-ready reporting. Designed to work with existing finance systems, these capabilities help finance teams operate more efficiently while maintaining control and transparency.

Procurement and sourcing

We apply Gen AI to streamline and strengthen procurement operations. Our solutions help extract insights from contracts and spend data, improving visibility into obligations, terms, and supplier risk. Gen AI accelerates sourcing operations by drafting requests for proposals (RFPs), evaluating supplier responses, and summarizing key trade-offs for decision-making. During contract management, Gen AI highlights compliance gaps, renewal timelines, and pricing anomalies. Intelligent assistants support day-to-day execution by responding to stakeholder queries, guiding users through policies, and generating documentation across the source-to-pay process. These capabilities reduce cycle times, improve accuracy, and free up procurement teams to focus on strategic activities.

Human resources and talent management

We use Gen AI to automate and enhance core HR services. Our Gen AI-powered HR solutions handle routine employee inquiries, generate personalized responses, and assist with tasks such as benefits clarification, payroll support, and policy guidance, reducing service desk volumes and improving response times. Gen AI also supports talent acquisition by drafting job descriptions, screening resumes, and summarizing candidate profiles. AI-powered analytics helps identify skill gaps, attrition risks, and development needs, enabling faster, more informed decisions. Our Gen AI solutions are designed to integrate with existing HR platforms, ensuring scalable, secure, and efficient service delivery without disrupting existing workflows.

Information technology

Our Gen AI solutions help IT organizations reduce manual effort, improving service responsiveness and delivery. We deploy intelligent virtual agents to resolve routine incidents through context-aware diagnostics, reducing ticket volumes and resolution times. Our Gen AI-powered IT solutions can draft code, documentation, and test scripts to streamline development and maintenance tasks. We also enable AI-driven knowledge management by curating and updating support content in real time, improving self-service outcomes and reducing escalations. Integrated within existing IT ecosystems, our Gen AI solutions deliver scalable impact while freeing IT teams to focus on innovation and strategic priorities.

Supply chain and logistics

Our Gen AI solutions give supply chain teams a clear, real-time view of orders, inventory, and shipments across sourcing, transportation, and warehousing. We use AI to test different delivery routes and shipping plans, helping reduce costs and speed up deliveries. Our Gen AI-powered solutions also help automate sourcing steps, review contracts faster, and resolve issues in the procure-to-pay process. This leads to faster cycle times, stronger compliance, better supplier performance, and more savings. These solutions work with your current systems to improve decision-making and make supply chain operations more efficient and responsive.

Customer service and support

Our Gen AI solutions improve customer support by handling high volumes of routine inquiries across chat, email, and voice channels. Virtual assistants deliver fast, consistent answers, reducing ticket volumes and improving response times. When issues are more complex, Gen AI uses sentiment and conversation history to route them to the right teams. Our Gen AI-powered solutions can help you highlight common issues and guide service improvements over time. Together, these capabilities improve efficiency, reduce costs, and enhance the customer experience.

Legal

Our Gen AI solutions help legal teams automate time-consuming tasks and improve risk oversight. Our Gen AI-powered solutions can extract key terms and clauses from contracts such as renewal dates, obligations, and adversarial clauses, allowing faster reviews and better compliance tracking. Regulatory-monitoring agents scan for legal and policy changes, flagging impacted documents or areas of concern. Our Gen AI solutions can also generate first drafts of standard agreements, nondisclosure agreements (NDAs), and compliance summaries — freeing legal professionals to focus on higher-risk matters. These capabilities shorten cycle times, reduce legal workload, and improve response to regulatory change.

Navigating the AI journey: From strategy to implementation

Successful AI adoption requires a structured, outcome-driven approach. The Hackett Group^® uses a four-phase framework to move enterprises from AI ideation to deployment — ensuring business alignment, accelerated execution, and scalable impact.

Hackett AI XPLR^™ combines Digital World Class^® benchmarks, best practices and digital transformation expertise to accelerate ideation.
Reveals high-value opportunities for AI adoption by showing where it can deliver the greatest impact across the enterprise.
Highlights industry-specific use cases and process-level opportunities, ensuring leaders see practical applications relevant to their business context.
Pinpoints client-specific agentic AI opportunities precisely aligned with industry, functional priorities, enterprise architecture and tech landscape.
Accelerates discovery by focusing on areas with proven value potential using Hackett’s proprietary solution library spanning the front, middle and back office.

Delivers end-to-end AI solution designs defining where AI assists, augments or acts autonomously.
Provides agentic workflow designs ready for orchestration.
Conducts feasibility assessments with ROI and impact modeling.
Evaluates AI opportunities by feasibility, cost and business value and helps prioritize them.

ZBrain^™, Hackett’s agentic AI orchestration platform, enables the development and deployment of AI agents at scale.
A rich library of pre-built agents and templates accelerates time-to-value for high-impact use cases.
Model-agnostic architecture allows seamless integration with both proprietary and open-source AI models.
Over 200 prebuilt data connectors link to enterprise systems to extract, organize and index information, creating a dynamic knowledge repository.
ZBrain^™ ensures safe, accurate, reliable and consistent performance of agents with built-in guardrails, robust data governance and real-time feedback loops.
Multi-agent orchestration enables autonomous execution of complex workflows.

With ZBrain^™, enterprises can evaluate agent performance, generate evaluation reports and enhance outcomes through human feedback.
Monitor activity end-to-end, track performance on specified metrics and drive improvements through logs and feedback.

Our deep expertise across the AI stack

At The Hackett Group®, we bring specialized expertise across the full AI spectrum — enabling us to strategically select and implement the right technologies to solve your unique challenges and deliver measurable results.

Gen AI

We design and deploy Gen AI solutions using foundation models tuned for GBS. Capabilities include retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), prompt engineering, model fine-tuning, domain adaptation, and agentic workflows — ensuring secure, scalable solutions that align with enterprise service goals.

Machine learning

We leverage statistical and algorithmic approaches to uncover hidden patterns and relationships within your data. Our expertise encompasses supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning, enabling us to develop powerful predictive systems, classification and regression solutions, and anomaly detection capabilities.

Deep learning

We use deep learning to address complex language, vision and forecasting challenges. Our experience with convolutional neural networks (CNNs), recurrent neural
networks (RNNs) and transformer models deliver advanced solutions that handle multimodal data like text, images, and audio.

Natural language processing (NLP)

We build NLP solutions that analyze, interpret and generate natural language with contextual depth. Our core capabilities include semantic analysis, entity extraction, sentiment classification, and advanced language generation — converting unstructured text into structured, actionable insights.

Data science

Our data science practice delivers interpretable, reliable models using advanced statistical methods. We leverage Bayesian inference, feature engineering, and outcome validation to generate insights from complex CRISP-DM framework.

Computer vision

We implement computer vision solutions to analyze and extract meaning from images and videos. Our expertise includes image classification, object detection, segmentation, and optical character recognition (OCR) — enabling intelligence from visual data.

Data annotation

We implement scalable data labeling processes essential for supervised learning. Our capabilities include structured annotation processes, built-in quality checks, and specialized tools for labeling text, images, and video — ensuring high-quality training data for accurate, reliable AI model development.

MLOps and AgentOps infrastructure

We build robust operational frameworks to manage the full AI model life cycle. Our expertise spans automated training pipelines, version control, monitoring frameworks, and deployment strategies that ensure scalable, governed, high-performing transitions from development to production.

Time series analysis

We apply specialized algorithms to analyze time-based GBS data. Our core strengths include identifying trends, modeling seasonality and generating forecasts — enabling predictive insights for use cases such as transaction volume forecasting, staffing and capacity planning, cash flow projection and service-level optimization across GBS functions.

Our additional assets to accelerate your business processes

At The Hackett Group^®, we offer a suite of proprietary tools designed to accelerate and optimize your Gen AI initiatives within GBS:

Hackett AI XPLR^™

Hackett AI XPLR^™ accelerates AI solution ideation and design for client-specific business processes and workflows, translating opportunities into build-ready AI design blueprints for Gen AI solutions.

Hackett Connect^®

Tap into the collective knowledge of the world’s best businesses and our experts. Unlock insights that drive innovation and accelerate your success, anytime, from any device.

Quantum Leap^®

Automate benchmarking data collection and uncover performance gaps. Optimize business strategies through continuous improvement and real-time, data-driven insights across key enterprise functions.

Digital Transformation Platform

Optimize enterprise applications with Hackett-Certified^® best practices, AI-enabled process flows, and performance metrics. Enable scalable Gen AI integration and enterprisewide digital transformation.

ZBrain^™

Build AI solutions and task-specific agents with a low-code, enterprise-grade agentic AI orchestration platform. Integrate multiple LLMs, automate workflows, and deploy secure, scalable solutions.

Why partner with The Hackett Group^® ?

The Hackett Group^® brings a uniquely strategic, data-driven approach to Gen AI implementation in GBS. We focus on aligning Gen AI with enterprise GBS strategies – ensuring responsible AI adoption and tangible improvements in service efficiency, decision quality, and business impact. With this foundation, we help GBS organizations confidently navigate the Gen AI journey — from opportunity identification to enterprisewide implementation.

Proven Gen AI consulting expertise: Backed by decades of experience in guiding enterprises to adopt and operationalize Gen AI, our experts help GBS teams streamline operations, reduce manual workload, and improve decision-making across GBS functions.

Robust AI implementation approach: Our structured implementation approach accelerates Gen AI deployment and shortens time-to-value. We help operationalize AI by turning strategy into scalable solutions, delivering measurable outcomes across GBS functions.

Benchmark-driven insights: Our recommendations are grounded in proprietary benchmarking data and Digital World Class® research, enabling evidence-based prioritization and confident Gen AI investment decisions.

Responsible AI practices: We help enterprises implement Gen AI solutions that are ethically sound, compliant with regulatory policies, and aligned with internal guidelines – enabling responsible, transparent decision-making across operations.

Outcome-driven methodology: Every AI initiative is designed with clear, measurable business outcomes – whether it’s increasing productivity, lowering costs, or driving value creation. We track return on investment (ROI) across the entire life cycle to ensure each phase contributes meaningful, strategic impact to your GBS model.

Data integrity and compliance: We ensure your data is secure, governed and AI-ready. Our approach aligns Gen AI initiatives with enterprise architecture, risk protocols and data privacy standards to support trusted, scalable AI adoption.

Change enablement and workforce readiness: We enable sustainable transformation by providing your teams with the skills, tools, and training required to effectively adopt, scale, and manage Gen AI initiatives with confidence.

FAQs

What is GBS?

Global business services (GBS) is a unified service delivery model that integrates functions like finance, HR, procurement, IT, and customer service under a centralized governance framework. It focuses on driving efficiency, scalability and enterprisewide value.

How is Gen AI transforming GBS operations?

Gen AI enables GBS organizations to automate complex tasks, generate insights from large datasets, and improve decision-making. It allows organizations to evolve from transactional processing to delivering proactive, data-driven support across business units.

How can GBS organizations identify where to apply Gen AI?

Platforms like Hackett AI XPLR™ help GBS teams assess AI readiness, map business processes and identify high-impact Gen AI use cases across service lines. This ensures targeted AI investments and measurable results.

How can we prepare our GBS workforce for Gen AI adoption?

Workforce enablement includes building Gen AI fluency, evolving job roles, and managing change through targeted training and upskilling programs. This ensures employees can effectively work alongside AI and deliver sustainable performance.

How does The Hackett Group® support Gen AI in GBS?

We offer end-to-end services – from strategy development and use case prioritization to custom Gen AI solution development, implementation, and benchmarking. Tools like ZBrain^™, Quantum Leap^® and Hackett Connect^® help accelerate your AI-powered GBS journey.

Accelerate your GBS transformation with Gen AI

Enhance your GBS performance – leverage Gen AI
to streamline operations and deliver measurable results.