The Last Word: Those working on Central and Eastern Europe’s narrative should stop selling what they do, and start selling what they see.
Ask a room why the GBS sector in Central and Eastern Europe works and the answer usually arrives in a tidy order: cost, talent, geography, incentives. It is the pitch-deck catechism. Reasonable enough, perhaps, when the sector was still explaining itself to global headquarters. But it now sounds like a sentence trapped in the wrong decade.
The circumstances have changed. The work has changed. The clients have changed. Yet too much of the story has not. The region still too often sells itself as a place where global companies can get capable work done at attractive prices, close to important markets, by well-educated people in pleasant cities. None of this is false. That is precisely the problem. It is true, familiar and no longer sufficient.
Poland alone now has over 2,000 business service centres, employing almost half a million people, with knowledge-intensive business services exports valued at almost 43 billion US dollars. Association of Business Service Leaders (ABSL) says nearly 60 per cent of the services delivered by the sector are now knowledge-intensive, while more than 54 per cent involve complex mid-office work such as planning, cybersecurity and advanced analytics. Those numbers should change the conversation. They suggest that Central and Eastern Europe is no longer merely a delivery location. It is becoming a place where global businesses learn how they really operate.
That is a very different proposition. A service centre processes work. An intelligent operating centre sees the organisation through the work. It notices where approvals stall, where policies contradict each other, where systems do not talk, where customers repeat the same complaint, where finance, procurement, HR, compliance and technology are all solving different versions of the same problem.
This is where the next narrative should begin. Not with what the sector does, but with what it sees.
The hidden power of GBS
The old GBS language was built around efficiency. It asked: can the work be centralised, standardised, moved, measured and made cheaper? The new language must be built around organisational learning. It should ask: what does the work reveal about the enterprise? What can be redesigned? What should be stopped? What exceptions keep recurring? Where is the business pretending that a process exists, when in reality a thousand heroic workarounds are holding it together?
This is the hidden power of GBS. It sits at the crossing point of functions, markets, systems and habits. It sees the invoice that finance rejects, the supplier that procurement cannot onboard, the employee query that HR cannot close, the customer issue that operations keep escalating. Headquarters often sees strategy. Business units see their own pressure. GBS sees the connective tissue.
That is why competing on cost is now a dangerous comfort. Cost is easy to benchmark and easier to beat. There will always be another market, model or machine that promises to do the same task for less. But the ability to interpret operational reality is harder to copy. So is the ability to redesign processes across boundaries, embed new ways of working, and turn repeated friction into institutional learning.
Technology will accelerate this shift, but it should not hijack the story. Everyone is tired of being told that AI changes everything. More useful is the quieter truth: intelligent tools only work when the organisation has disciplined processes, clean enough data, clear ownership and the confidence to redesign work rather than merely digitise disorder. EY makes a similar point in arguing that GBS is where process discipline, governance and cross-enterprise reach converge.
More than a location
So the question for Central and Eastern Europe is not whether its GBS sector can survive automation. The better question is whether it can stop describing itself as a labour market and start behaving like an operating brain.
For governments and investment agencies, this means retiring the brochure language. Do not sell cities only as locations. Sell them as ecosystems capable of building enterprise capability. For GBS leaders, it means resisting the temptation to be proud only of scale, headcount and service catalogues. The future belongs to centres that can say, with evidence: we do not simply run your processes; we understand where your organisation learns, leaks and lags.
And for global companies, it means changing the brief. Do not ask Eastern Europe merely to take work off your hands. Ask it to show you what your work has become.
The sector’s next export will not be cheaper administration. It will be operating intelligence: the capacity to see across complexity, redesign how work flows, and help organisations become more honest about themselves. So for those working on the narrative: stop selling what you do, start selling what you see.
Photo: Dreamstime.