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Vikas Gopal
Global Managing Partner, CFO and GBS services
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Autonomous business services are transforming various corporate functions. What once existed to drive efficiency and capitalize on location arbitrage is maturing to become a cornerstone of the digitally enabled enterprise.
Global business services – the provision of shared services, corporate functions and centers of excellence, whether captive or outsourced, at home or offshore – is an established and proven part of all large enterprises’ operations. Over several decades, centralization, standardization and automation have all contributed incrementally to cost savings and efficiency.
Thirty years ago, enterprise resource planning (ERP) tools introduced a new digital information layer and gave businesses access to connected organizational intelligence and a view across silos. But ‘connecting the dots’ and using this data layer to inform decision-making has proved a challenge for many.
Today, the arrival of agentic AI paves the way for a new era of autonomous business services where digital labor augments human labor.
It heralds a great leap forward for organizational intelligence.
The promise of agentic AI is that agents won’t just capture and interpret data. They can begin to act on it albeit with human oversight.
Beyond the ability to sense, synthesize, and present the most relevant insights, agentic AI can autonomously execute workflows and do so cognizant of the trade-offs required to achieve specified goals. This seamless execution of tasks frees humans from manual, repetitive tasks such as data retrieval and aggregation.
Research conducted by TCS and MIT Sloan Management Review points to Intelligent Choice Architectures (ICAs) as the way this step change is achieved. A growing body of evidence shows the benefits across multiple industries.
ICAs are AI-driven systems built to shape the environment in which people make decisions. They combine agentic, generative, and predictive AI capabilities to create, refine, and present a range of options to human decision makers. Such enhanced decision environments actively structure the data, options, and trade-offs to produce decisions that lead to better outcomes.
The goal is to do more than nudge managers to make better individual decisions. The power of ICAs is to improve the overall quality of decision making across the enterprise. Autonomy is a key component.
Humans remain embedded at the points of intent-setting, ethical judgment, and value trade-offs. They serve as ‘intelligent choice architects’ and the backbone of what we now think of as human-centric AI.
ICAs provide a cognitive layer and a catalyst for autonomous business services. Knowledge flows consistently across domains. Synthesized data can be acted on in real-time. Decision-making shifts from reactive and siloed to orchestrated and enterprise wide. The result is smarter, faster, and context-aware decisions.
ICAs can read what has been the past response to a certain scenario and which actions were able to generate the best results. The model learns from historic decisions and the resulting success rates to determine its best course of action.
The applications are many and can be found across the value chain. Our report highlights examples in manufacturing, human resources, supply chain and customer experience.
Finance is one of the key beneficiaries. The finance function is home to experienced and knowledgeable managers with access to large quantities of data, but its historic role has been to record history rather than script the future. That’s set to change.
As a central service function, finance touches all other parts of the business. It is therefore one of the places where autonomous decision-making can deliver the greatest value.
ICAs in finance have the power to ‘connect the dots.’ In doing so, they can present business leaders across the enterprise with choices that they historically were either unaware of or didn’t consider as options because they weren’t provided with the full context.
Let’s look at some routine tasks that can be reimagined to become drivers of value creation:
With ICAs, the AI-enabled finance function can move from a scribe function keeping tabs on what has gone before to becoming a valuable forward-focused partner. It becomes the provider of enterprise-wide intelligence that makes better decisions.
Autonomous business services can ensure that those better decisions are not just the preserve of a single function. The benefits in one area of business will be applied elsewhere, and to maximum effect.