Alexandru Stoenescu, Vice President, Europe Operations, Country Lead Romania & Bulgaria, Genpact: Up to 70 percent of the work that is done in our industry today can be automated

The leaders in business services industry gathered for sharing their latest insights on the evolution and shifts in their work and companies at the 11th Edition of THE ROMANIAN BUSINESS SERVICES FORUM & AWARDS.

In the discussion of the CEO Forum panel, Alexandru Stoenescu, Vice President, Europe Operations, Country Lead Romania & Bulgaria, Genpact detailed on the local market advantages as destination for business services, the AI effects in workspace and work processes and the highlights of the future of work in this context.

From a market perspective, Romania still has a lot of advantages. Number one is talent availability. I know everyone is complaining about a shortage of talent. Yes, there is, but Romania still has a lot of room to grow and still has a lot of talent. The business services industry in Romania still has room to grow.

Number two advantage is demographics. There are certain parts of Romania, tier-2 cities which are actually evolving. I would particularly call out Iasi, which is one of the few areas in Europe that has population growth.

We are heavily investing in Iasi, we are betting on Iasi and the surrounding areas to be next hot spot of Romania, and we have established a center that is growing rapidly. The third advantage of Romania is cost. While costs have gone up, and Bucharest has become more expensive, Bucharest is still at the level of tier 2 cities in Poland, for instance, with higher availability of talent.

If you put together some of the other emerging parts of Romania, you have a good value proposition for a lot of companies and a lot of new companies. To my knowledge, there are still 12 to 15 new logos opening a shared services center or a hub here in Romania every year.

The fourth advantage of the country is relevance. Growth can only be inextricably linked to the relevance of the service and so far the industry in Romania has delivered cost and language. That value proposition is shifting very rapidly. The shift of what the value proposition should be is actually the question. For now, it’s a good environment but obviously we have to ride the winds of change and make sure the industry is future proof.

AI is the largest revolution in terms of social impact since the printed press era. IN my opinion, it is underhyped and, in my estimations, up to 70 percent of the work that is done in our industry today can be automated or eliminated by agentic or generative AI. And having the tech savvy individuals to enable this is actually the opportunity. The window of opportunity is on a long term, because now, companies are facing a couple of challenges: one of them, is data.

This factor comes unclear and confusing because currently, is resulting from different sources, it comes unstructured and unclean. Clean data is absolutely critical. The second challenge is the process and process expertise. You have to design the write process to  scale and yield the right impact. The third challenge is the change management. There are a lot of generative AI-based projects which are working but they have a low scale opportunity because the companies are not yet prepare to implement the necessary changes. All these together lead to a skilling and reskilling opportunity, not to say even mission.

At the level of our industry, aspects like costs, language, proximity, nearshore, offshore will be managed by technologies. And the companies acting on the industry need to pinpoint aspects such as innovation, to start with. A strong company must be seen as an innovation center, developing intellectual property that yields a result. This means that a company has a say when platforms, ERPS and systems are being chosen by clients and combing all these, put you, as a company at the forefront of the innovation. This cannot be done in the absence of deep technology upskilling done in a constant manner.

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