The Shared Services and Outsourcing Network (SSON) hosted its annual, Shared Services and Outsourcing Week (SSON) from March 26-28 in Orlando, Florida with over 1,000 shared services professionals in attendance. As a leader in the industry, and named one of the five top shared services providers across the globe, the Siemens GBS team was tapped to bring its expertise to the event. Leading a boot camp on generative AI was head of digital solutions – the Americas, Niko Barth. Serving on a mainstage panel discussion on how to navigate digital disruption in Global Business Services with representatives from GBS Mastercard and GBS Merck, was head of the GBS Americas, Christof Fahr, who shared some of the highlights of the event below.

We operate in a time when, with the advances in technology, the ever-present disruptions to our economy and the various conflicts erupting around the globe, the topic of how to navigate digital disruptions is particularly relevant today. Our discussion focused on the need for continuous employee and leadership training to enable and empower our employees to deal with digital disruption and the need to diversify talent from the outside in times of rapid technology change. This includes focused training for our people to reskill and upskill to equip them for the future.

Generative AI (Gen AI) was a main theme in most of the sessions attended, however the panel recognized that we cannot just buy AI from the open market. “We need strong quality and security measures in place to protect the company,” stated Fahr. This brought into focus the need for GBS organizations to create secure platforms. In collaboration between Siemens IT and Siemens GBS, a secure Generative AI platform was co-created that harnesses platforms like CLAUD and CHAT GBT. This has resulted in value-based prioritization of use cases, beginning with our generative AI symposium that drives our efforts to create customer value such as cost avoidance, revenue, cost savings and quality. We discussed how Gen AI is being implemented without creating entirely new teams and discovered that many of the GBS organizations are leveraging their advanced analytics teams to promote these initiatives.

With this advanced technology, comes the need for creative ways to use it in support of our customers. At Siemens GBS, we have recently begun an innovation network of likeminded people who drive the use cases to improve our customers’ experience. In addition, we have also embraced agile methodologies and created a safe experimental environment where our employees can create minimally viable products quickly to continually improve our innovation practices.

Lastly, with the speed in which technology advances, the panel took on the topic of change management and what role GBS organizations play in their customers’ change processes. The panel believe strongly that GBS should provide the processes and technology to engage changes that belong to the customer.

“GBS’ active role in driving and enabling innovation, change management owned by the business but executed and facilitated by GBS, collaboration with our customers through communities, and the importance of fostering a culture of innovation and experimentation,” stated Fahr.

With most of the topics centered around Generative AI, read more about Siemens GBS and Generative AI .

Interested in learning more about Generative AI from a Record-to-Report perspective? Find out more about Siemens GBS and AI in our Financial Insights blog.