How the Middle East Is Leapfrogging Shared Services Maturity with AI
1. A New Starting Line for Smart Services
Across the Middle East, an economic transformation is underway. Governments in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt are funneling billions into digital infrastructure, artificial intelligence, and workforce development. From national visions like the UAE's AI Strategy 2031 to Saudi Arabia’s sweeping Vision 2030, the region is building not just smart cities, but smart service economies.
Within this surge, Shared Services Centers (SSCs), Global Capability Centers (GCCs), and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) hubs are positioned to play a transformative role. Unlike their counterparts in legacy markets - who spent decades climbing the maturity curve - Middle Eastern centres have the opportunity to leapfrog, taking those hard-won lessons and applying them to their own organizations. New facilities can skip the incremental steps by starting with cloud-native systems, digital-first design, and strong executive mandates. And with SSON Research & Analytics reporting that 57% of global SSOs either shifting to new regions or expanding footprints into new markets, the Middle East finds itself in the path of global investment flows - ready to convert interest into infrastructure.
This is not simply about cost efficiency. With the right blueprint, these centres can deliver advanced analytics, real-time service delivery, and end-to-end innovation - becoming value creators aligned with their parent enterprises' most strategic goals.
2. The Traditional Maturity Model - and Why It Fails Many
In most global contexts, shared services evolve in four steps. The journey reflects a long, deliberate shift from decentralized processing to integrated, insights-driven operations:
Fragmented ➡ Efficient ➡ Value-Adding ➡ Strategic
But the reality for many organizations is stall-out. Legacy infrastructure, conflicting process standards, and a lack of enterprise-wide alignment slow or even halt transformation. Cultural resistance and unclear governance compound the drag. In Egypt, several shared services initiatives have been delayed or derailed as regional centers - each aligned with different business units or ministries - struggle to agree on standardized workflows, governance responsibilities, and data ownership. SSON research and regional commentary point to recurring governance challenges in Egypt’s shared services landscape, where conflicts over ownership of finance functions - such as accounts payable - can delay progress and complicate transformation programs.
These conflicts reflect deeper structural fragmentation that undermines scalability and enterprise-wide visibility These are more than growing pains. When organizations try to leap ahead without foundational process control or clear sponsorship, they risk systemic failure - missed SLAs, compliance lapses, and user dissatisfaction. Real progress requires equal doses of discipline and ambition. One without the other ensures either paralysis or chaos.
3. What Makes Leapfrogging Possible (and Safe)
In the Middle East, shared services can take a different path. The right conditions are converging - visionary leadership, greenfield design freedom, and national infrastructure built for AI and automation. Across the region, new SSCs are being launched with tech stacks that bypass the constraints of legacy systems. These include:
- Robotic Process Automation (RPA) for transactional efficiency.
- Generative AI (GenAI) for content creation, summarization, and service interactions.
- Agentic AI, a frontier technology that pairs large language models with execution logic - enabling AI to complete workflows, make decisions, and dynamically adjust based on context.
Consider a Saudi Aramco-affiliated shared services centre that used GenAI to automate procurement documentation, including PO processing and vendor onboarding, reducing lead times by half and significantly improving cycle transparency. Or a UAE-based HR service hub within a large government services conglomerate that deployed a GenAI-powered virtual assistant trained on bilingual HR policies, enabling it to respond to employee queries in both Arabic and English with 24/7 availability and 90% first-contact resolution.
Still, this isn’t a free pass. Leapfrogging introduces real risks:
- Misuse or premature scaling of AI can lead to privacy and compliance issues.
- Absent governance - no audit trails, no human-in-the-loop checks - can cause loss of trust internally and externally.
To manage the ambition safely, experts recommend a portfolio approach like the 70-20-10 model: 70% of resources on maintaining and optimizing core service delivery, 20% on incremental improvements and scaling proven innovations, and 10% on high-risk, high-reward innovation pilots that push the boundaries of what shared services can do.
4. From Cost Center to Value Creation Engine
Today’s leading SSCs aren’t just automating invoices or processing claims - they’re generating insights, improving capital flows, and elevating customer experience. This evolution is particularly salient in the Middle East, where smart design meets strategic intent.
In the UAE, a shared services unit within a major investment holding company deployed GenAI to auto-generate quarterly and board-level management commentary. This automation freed analysts to focus on financial modeling and forward-looking insights. In Egypt, an analytics CoE embedded within a regional retail group's SSC deployed AI-based demand forecasting, resulting in improved inventory turnover and reduced stockouts across multiple store locations.
To show they’re more than back-office engines, SSCs are using a broader set of KPIs:
Research confirms: high-performing GBS organizations measure business impact, not just process output.
That impact must also be visible. Leading centers publish “value reports,” track savings and revenue enablement, and translate automation wins into enterprise-level outcomes. Recent SSON research confirms that “value” is more than twice as important as customer satisfaction or even cost when it comes to stakeholder appreciation - a reminder that enterprise leaders want strategic contribution, not just operational delivery. Without this storytelling, SSCs risk being sidelined - as efficient, but irrelevant.
The Middle East has the talent, infrastructure, and national will to lead the next wave of shared services innovation. With 57% of global shared services actively shifting regions or adding new delivery locations, the region stands at the forefront of a once-in-a-decade relocation opportunity. Combined with generational investments in data infrastructure - like Dubai’s rise as the digital capital of the Middle East and the $5 billion Gulf Data Hub expansion - the conditions are ideal. Now is the time to build smart - and build boldly.
5. The Numbers Behind the Leap
Global benchmarks show just how much is at stake - and how much is possible. More than half of shared services organizations remain stuck in early or mid-maturity stages, unable to scale value beyond cost reduction. Everest Group reports that best-in-class GBS organizations achieve 40% higher automation rates and are twice as likely to use customer experience metrics in performance reviews.
Meanwhile, a 2024 study by IBM found that while 93% of enterprises see value in GenAI, only 9% feel fully prepared to govern it responsibly - revealing a major gap in AI readiness. And from a transformation ROI perspective, Genpact data shows that organizations that rethink entire processes (rather than optimize piecemeal) can achieve 50 - 80% performance gains - compared to 10 - 15% for incremental improvements.
In short, the difference between stalling and leapfrogging isn’t subtle. It’s exponential
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