Thirty years of SSOW is a long time. Long enough to watch shared services evolve from a cost-reduction instrument to a strategic capability platform. Long enough to see the same questions resurface, repackaged, in every generation of technology and organizational design. And long enough to recognize that the organizations getting it right are not the ones chasing the newest trend. They are the ones who built the architecture deliberately.

This year, the 30th Annual SSOW Americas convenes March 16-19 in Orlando. I will be serving in three roles on Wednesday, March 18, and each one sits at a different pressure point in the current GBS conversation. After 35 years in supply chain and logistics, including 28 years at DHL Global Forwarding where I built and scaled shared services operations from 4 to over 1,300 employees across four countries, I have watched these inflection points arrive before. This one is different in its speed, and similar in its underlying design challenge.

Most governance frameworks were built for a world where humans made every consequential decision. AI does not just add new risks to that model. It changes the fundamental assumption underneath it. When a model surfaces a recommendation, routes a case, or flags an exception, the accountability chain does not work the way it was designed to. Who owns that decision? How does escalation function when the trigger was automated? What does your governance structure look like when the decision-maker is not always a person?

This is not a theoretical conversation. The Interactive Discussion Group (IDG) with Tina Robinson-Adamski from Domino’s is built for practitioners who are already living these questions inside their operations. The format is designed to surface what is actually happening in the room, not what should be happening on paper. If your governance model was designed before AI became operational, this is the session where that gap becomes visible.

Most scope expansion in GBS is not designed. It is inherited. A function lands in the portfolio because nobody else claimed it, because a cost pressure forced a decision, or because the GBS team said yes before the operating model was ready to absorb it. The result is scope that is organizationally housed in GBS but not architecturally supported by it. The governance, the talent model, and the performance framework were all built for something different.

The more specific version of this problem looks like your most expensive, highest-judgment people spending the majority of their time on work that does not require their judgment. Account managers doing admin. Customer success managers doing order entry. Sales professionals doing account management instead of selling. The shared services engine that should be underneath those functions either does not exist or was not designed to support them. That is the gap this panel addresses directly. Tom McFarland of LHH brings a live case to this conversation, and the operating model implications are not abstract.

Case studies are where the architecture becomes real. CSL Behring and McCormick represent two distinct industries, two different organizational contexts, and two different reasons why scope expansion became a strategic priority. As Track Chair I will be drawing the connections between what each case reveals, and what the audience can take back to their own design conversations.

The most useful takeaway from any case study is not the result. It is the decision that preceded the result. Understanding why a function was absorbed into GBS, what had to change in governance and talent design to make it viable, and what the operating model looks like now is the substance that matters. That is what I will be focused on surfacing.

The 30th SSOW Americas is being staged at an inflection point. GBS organizations that built their authority on process efficiency are being asked to absorb functions that require judgment, relationship management, and domain expertise that offshore delivery models were not designed to provide. AI is accelerating every workflow while simultaneously creating accountability gaps that governance structures have not caught up to.

The organizations that will use this moment well are the ones who treat it as a design problem, not a capacity problem. The question is not whether to expand scope or adopt AI. The question is whether the architecture that governs those decisions is deliberate or implicit.

The Bestshoring Readiness Health Check™ is built to surface exactly this kind of structural gap in five minutes.

If you are attending SSOW Americas 2026, I would welcome the opportunity to connect in Orlando. Whether that is a conversation during the conference, a follow-on discussion about what the sessions surfaced for your organization, or a structured look at your Bestshoring architecture, the dialogue is always worth having.

SSON describes SSOW as the world’s largest and longest-running shared services event, and the 30th annual edition reflects that standing. The conversations in the room will be shaping GBS design for the next several years. I will bring the thinking back here after the conference closes.

Before Orlando: where does your GBS architecture stand on the three questions above? If you do not have a clean answer to even one of them, that is the conversation worth having in March, whether in the room or in advance of it.