Controller, Chief Accounting Officer & Principal Accounting Officer, Gannett
Search every verified Cindy Gallagher interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Cindy Gallagher, Controller, Chief Accounting Officer & Principal Accounting Officer at Gannett, has shared her perspectives on the future of global business services (GBS) in several podcast appearances. In a 2022 interview, Gallagher stated that robotic process automation (RPA) in its current form "will be dead" within ten years, predicting it will become a commodity similar to a Microsoft Office product. She also said that physical service centers will be "more dead than alive" but that a hybrid model will persist, and she expressed the view that artificial intelligence has not yet proven to be all it was hyped to be but has not been given a long enough runway. Gallagher emphasized that GBS leaders must challenge their teams to explore new service offerings and adapt delivery models to keep the centralized model alive as the "backbone of the organization." In earlier appearances, Gallagher discussed the importance of upskilling and reskilling the workforce for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, arguing that traditional learning and development platforms are necessary but insufficient. She advocated for C-level leadership dedicated to learning and development separate from traditional HR. Gallagher also described her approach at Discovery Communications, where she said the organization needed to listen more to customers and stakeholders, and she changed recruiting practices to seek people with a mindset of change and transformation rather than purely transactional skills. She noted that humans remain essential for cultural empathy, problem solving, and decision making, even as automation advances.
“I think they'll be alive but I think they'll look very different. The BPO model has shifted a lot as you know over the last 30 years. There's the model where captive centers try to transform the work and send it to the BPO. As we've learned that model results in slow transition of work and takes a lot of time to reach...”
“They will be more dead than alive but we're going to find ourselves living in a hybrid model probably for my entire lifetime. In that we began shifting 485 roles to our provider in December of 2020. So far all of this has been accomplished without a single foot in a physical center for either the BPO provider or us.”
“Current form it'll be dead. RPA will be a commodity to me, it'll be much like a Microsoft Office product. New joiners into our organization will probably start to list RPA skills and tools and things they have experience with on their resume just like they do their other credentials.”
“I think it'll be alive. I think there's a lot of return on investment with AI when it's implemented and managed correctly and AI so far hasn't proven to be all that it's been hyped up to be but I don't think we've given it a long enough runway and I don't think enough in the GBS field have harnessed the power of AI to...”
“It will not be the number one top choice maybe top ten so I don't think it will be completely dead but definitely not the top top choice and I say that knowing that I have a team in India today and I have had teams in India, almost my entire career. There's too much talent there. Too many large organizations have inves...”
“I think it'll be alive. I think it will continue to thrive, the term probably changes, we should be more focused on digital transformation and on providing greater enablers of front end customer-facing initiatives but, the centralized model, it will still exist as the backbone of the organization.”
“If we can't do that, GBS will die a quick and probably very painful death but GBS still provides many industries an opportunity to keep our costs low to perform processes efficiently with greater accuracy and scale than any single business unit could on its own so it's on my shoulders, it's on the shoulders of every GB...”
“We killed physical service centers in terms of the scale and how large they would be like today, RPA in the current form as-is automation of a small process and then India as a top destination for service center for outsourcing.”
“Some GBS leaders aim to transform and to be the backbone that we talked about earlier. While others are checking boxes and executing processes so, my advice is to ask yourself which of those categories you fit in and why do you feel you fit there. If the answer turns out that you fit in either of these scenarios becaus...”
“We want our employees to stay involved; we want to make sure we're delivering the right product or service to all of our consumers and stakeholders—that's the why.”
“Almost everyone is now saying there's still a place for humans; I never wanted to say that bots are going to take over every human process—we still need people for cultural empathy, problem solving, and decision making.”
“Traditional schooling is something people always default to, but within any corporate enterprise, we default to our traditional learning and development platform, which is absolutely needed but not enough.”
“We need to set an expectation that a certain percentage of time is spent learning, developing, and enhancing skills in different ways, and this could vary across different parts of the organization.”
“We really need to understand where people's strengths are and exploit those strengths by pointing them in a training direction that will help build upon those so they can be more successful in this next fourth Industrial Revolution.”
“Maybe no more humans? We also thought no more retail shops when Amazon hit the scene, but now Amazon is opening up physical retail shops—so in that kind of cycle, we say here's what we can automate, but here's what we want to do with the humans.”
About Season 2 In this engaging conversation, GBS leaders answer the DEAD or ALIVE Questions related to the ...
The key to a smooth transition into the Fourth Industrial Revolution is the ability to seamlessly upskill and reskill the workforce.
Since shared services were established back in the 80s, technology has rocketed forward in sophistication and digitally capable ...
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