Where should business services leaders invest to drive growth and resilience?

Take steps to reduce the complexity of your core platforms. This means consolidating fragmented systems, standardizing workflows, and designing enterprise architecture with modularity and scale in mind. By building flexibility into foundational systems—especially across finance, operations, and client delivery—your organization can pivot more quickly as client needs evolve.

Built environment services firms offer a strong example. By simplifying infrastructure and aligning regional systems with enterprise goals, they can help your organization maintain steady growth while containing costs.

A consistent, enterprise-wide data model is becoming essential for informed decision-making. Concentrate on unifying financial and operational data, perhaps through a centralized architecture that enables real-time visibility and helps your AI agents to interact with a consistent, enterprise-wide data set to generate more precise intelligence. A shared data language helps improve insight accuracy, makes performance benchmarking more meaningful, and strengthens alignment across functions.

Firms that adopted integrated benchmarking tools last year were better able to identify performance gaps and make targeted improvements. As a result, they’re not only improving productivity but sharpening capital allocation and resourcing strategies.

While moving to cloud can be a big technology play, it’s also an operating model shift. Firms advancing on this front are decommissioning legacy infrastructure and replacing it with scalable, secure platforms that can support global delivery, remote collaboration, and innovation at pace. By moving to cloud, your organization can gain greater access to managed services, which is often a cost-efficient alternative to in-house delivery. Managed services can also help unlock advanced offerings like digital agents and AI-enabled workflows that are harder to deploy and scale in traditional on-premises environments.

Across sectors, cloud-enabled organizations report gains in productivity and speed with stronger alignment between service delivery and evolving client expectations. The shift is also helping to reduce overhead and expand recurring revenue streams.

With the emergence of agentic AI and GenAI capabilities, businesses are under pressure to act––and act responsibly. Move fast, but deliberately. Identify use cases where AI can augment, not replace, human judgment, and build safeguards into models from the start. This includes piloting AI in areas such as proposal development, workflow automation, and scenario forecasting—all while aligning efforts with data governance and risk frameworks.

Our GBSI shows that early AI adopters, particularly in BPO and digital and education services, saw measurable improvements in productivity last year. The real differentiator, however, was how these organizations combined AI deployment with responsible change management and clear operating guardrails.

Outperformers are making learning an ongoing capability, not a one-time initiative. Digital learning platforms are enabling just-in-time upskilling, bringing market-relevant content directly into the flow of work. These programs are designed to prepare teams to work alongside emerging technologies, particularly AI, rather than be displaced by them.

Our GBSI shows that organizations investing in upskilling can better sustain productivity levels, even while facing cost and macroeconomic pressures. According to PwC’s Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey, 44% of business services employees are excited about AI, and half are curious. Fifty-seven percent have used AI in their jobs over the last 12 months, and within that group nearly three-quarters said it improved their productivity and work quality and enhanced their creativity.

Top-performers are activating cultures that support new thinking, fast feedback, and cross-functional collaboration. Internal innovation programs like hackathons and accelerator labs are becoming more common. At the same time, industry leaders are using digital collaboration tools to break down geographic and organizational silos—helping teams connect, co-create, and adapt in real time.

According to the GBSI, 39% of business services CEOs say their organizations have launched innovative service lines primarily in the past five years, a marker of how deeply culture and innovation are now linked to growth.

Data-driven workforce planning can help you align talent with future business needs. AI-based tools can help you map skills, model talent gaps, and simulate demand scenarios to inform various aspects, from recruitment strategies to succession plans. When paired with well-designed incentives, analytics can also help you drive engagement and retention by linking workforce insights to development and reward structures.

High performers in the GBSI used workforce analytics to help drive measurable gains in productivity, enhancing both how people work and where to direct development efforts.

Digital talent, like professionals in AI, data, and cybersecurity, are in high demand and short supply. To compete, industry leaders have refreshed their employee value proposition with more purpose-driven messaging, flexible career paths, and inclusive leadership models. They’ve also tailored strategies for key digital roles, recognizing that one-size-fits-all approaches can no longer attract or retain top talent.

Companies leading in AI adoption, including agentic AI, are also evolving their workforce models in parallel—linking technology investment with differentiated approaches to talent and culture.

Conduct regular reviews of your service mix, analyze profitability by offering, and identify opportunities to exit low-margin or low-demand areas. These reviews can help you reallocate resources toward high-growth, tech-enabled services—particularly those that are scalable, recurring, or positioned to meet emerging client needs. Scaling these offerings often involves rethinking pricing, delivery models, and staffing configurations to support faster go-to-market.

Our GBSI shows that legal and digital and education services firms—both of which introduced AI-enabled offerings—recorded the strongest performance improvements since FY19, with 18- and 24-point gains respectively. And with 46% of business service employees citing changing customer preferences as one of the top three areas expected to impact their jobs over the next three years, aligning service portfolios with shifting client expectations is a key driver of future competitiveness.

Client expectations are rising, and digital experiences are increasingly a differentiator. Invest in platforms that enable personalized, omnichannel engagement. These platforms use predictive analytics to help anticipate client needs, streamline onboarding, and identify upsell opportunities. In many cases, digital interfaces can also help reduce service friction, boost satisfaction, and increase retention.

Firms reinvesting in digital client engagement report stronger revenue growth and higher retention rates, with gains linked to both improved satisfaction and expanded wallet share.

To meet client demands for flexibility and speed, shift from fixed service models to modular, cloud-enabled ones. These platforms allow for rapid configuration of solutions, co-creation with clients, and faster pricing and proposal cycles. AI is playing a growing role in these models by streamlining content creation, tailoring solution sets, and enabling real-time customization based on client inputs.

Our GBSI highlights that firms in the BPO and professional services sectors embracing digital delivery models demonstrate greater operational agility and improved responsiveness to market demands.

Client success is becoming a structured discipline, not just a relationship function. Embed data and feedback loops into your service models to track outcomes, identify opportunities to deepen relationships, and continuously refine delivery. Translate performance data into value stories that can support renewals and strategic growth conversations.

By building continuous feedback and outcome tracking into your client ecosystems, you can be better positioned to innovate, expand relationships, and strengthen retention.