Dear Deb #3: On Decision Rights and what AI actually exposes
Dear Deb,
As Global Capability Centers mature across locations like India, the Philippines, and Costa Rica, what specific leadership actions and operating model shifts are required for GCC leaders to transition from transactional, cost-focused support hubs to strategic enterprise partners, especially in the new AI world?
—Upender Rao, Salesforce , Former GBS APAC Lead
Dear Upender,
This is a good question — and a deceptively hard one — because most people answer it by listing attributes of a “strategic” GCC rather than talking about what actually has to change to get there.
So let me start by pushing back gently on the maturity premise.
GCCs don’t become strategic because they mature. They become strategic only if the work, authority, and accountability mature. Those things don’t move on their own.
In most enterprises, GCCs in India, the Philippines, and Costa Rica have absolutely matured in scale, competence, and credibility. That’s not the gap. The gap is that we keep asking them to behave like enterprise partners while still structuring them as cost-focused execution hubs.
That tension won’t resolve itself. Leaders have to break it.
The first leadership shift is personal, not structural. GCC leaders who are able to make this transition stop defining success by how much work they absorb or how efficiently they run the machine—the current standard success metrics. They start by asking harder, less comfortable questions: What work shouldn’t live here anymore? What decisions should live here that don’t today? Where are we creating dependency instead of leverage?
That’s a different posture. It means being willing to say no to work that reinforces the factory model, even when that work is politically easy to accept and looks good on a scope slide.
The second shift is about decision rights, not talent. We spend a lot of time talking about upgrading skills, hiring more “strategic” profiles, or building consultative capability in GCCs. That’s all fine, but it’s all secondary unless the RACI changes. People don’t act strategically unless they are allowed to decide something that matters and live with the consequences.
In many GCCs, even mature ones, decision rights are still tightly held elsewhere. The center executes. The business decides. When that’s the case, the GCC can influence, recommend, and analyze, but it can’t partner. Partnership requires shared accountability for outcomes, not just responsibility for tasks.
The third shift is in how the operating model treats work that sits between functions. Strategic value almost never comes from running a single process well. It comes from stitching together flows, resolving trade-offs, and prioritizing across silos. Most GCCs are still organized, funded, and measured function by function, which makes that kind of enterprise work structurally hard.
Leaders who successfully reposition their GCCs deliberately take on messy, cross-functional problems—the ones no single function wants to own—and redesign the model to support them. That usually means different governance, different funding conversations, and different metrics than the traditional SLA and utilization playbook.
AI makes all of this more urgent, but not in the way most people think.
AI doesn’t magically turn a transactional center into a strategic one. What it does is remove the hiding places. As execution becomes cheaper and more automated, it becomes very obvious which parts of the GCC’s value proposition were about doing work, and which were about shaping outcomes.
In the AI world, GCC leaders who succeed are the ones who stop leading with productivity stories and start leading with judgment stories. Not “look how much faster we process,” but “look how we changed the decision, the flow, the risk profile, or the economics of this work.”
That requires a different operating model muscle: fewer hero pilots, fewer local optimizations, and much clearer ownership of enterprise-level outcomes.
Finally, and this matters more than people like to admit, the enterprise has to meet the GCC halfway. You can’t ask a center to be a strategic partner while funding it as a cost line, escalating risk upward, and pulling work back the moment it becomes sensitive. When that happens, the GCC learns very quickly where the real ceiling is.
So the transition you’re asking about isn’t a maturity curve or a location story. It’s a set of deliberate leadership choices: what work to exit, what decisions to claim, what trade-offs to own, and what outcomes to be measured on — even when that makes people uncomfortable.
When those choices are made, GCCs stop being support hubs almost by accident. When they aren’t, no amount of AI, talent refresh, or rebranding will get you there.
Deborah
