Cindy Gallagher on GBS
From RPA will be a commodity in ten years| SVP Shared Services at Gannett - Cindy Gallagher| S2 E1 · · The GBS Masterminds Podcast
“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.”
On , Cindy Gallagher, Controller, Chief Accounting Officer & Principal Accounting Officer at GANNETT CO INC, spoke about GBS during RPA will be a commodity in ten years| SVP Shared Services at Gannett - Cindy Gallagher| S2 E1 on The GBS Masterminds Podcast.
About Cindy Gallagher
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.