Our Thinking
This is where we unpack what’s happening out there, what it means for you, and why it matters. Expect good reads, strong opinions, and the occasional well-placed challenge.
Global Capability Centers were built for efficiency. That made sense once, but not anymore. Today, speed, adaptability, and connectedness define competitive advantage. Too many GCCs still follow a static playbook: centralize, standardize, and hope for scale. The result? Centers that are efficient on paper but disconnected in practice.
At Yates, we help enterprises design GCCs that learn as they grow. Centers that sense change early, realign quickly, and act with purpose. We treat the operating model like a product: something you iterate, not install. When governance lives inside the workflow, when metrics track adaptability instead of cost, and when leadership shifts from command to coordination, the GCC becomes more than a delivery hub. It becomes an adaptive system and your organization’s engine for continuous evolution.
- Build for Change, Not Just Scale. Rethink your GCC as a living system that learns and adapts.
- Change the Measures. Start measuring alignment, resilience, and speed of learning.
- From Control to Coordination. Replace bureaucracy with shared visibility and orchestration.
- Make Adaptability Your Advantage. The best GCCs don’t just deliver—they evolve with the business.
Rethinking the GCC
The Great Unlock
AI isn’t the unlock, it’s the test. Most organizations have adopted the tools but not the transformation. They’ve automated around the edges while keeping old structures intact. The real unlock happens when you redesign the operating model itself: how work flows, how decisions are made, and how value moves through the business.
At Yates, we start where transformation actually happens: in the design of the system. We help teams rebuild workflows, decision rights, and accountability for a world where human and machine intelligence work side by side. The goal isn’t more automation—it’s smarter execution. When your operating model becomes adaptive, AI stops being a side project and starts driving performance across the enterprise.
- AI Won’t Save a Broken System. Redesign the model it runs on.
- Adoption to Impact. Transformation happens when the way you work changes, not the tools you use.
- Focus on Outcomes, Not Overhead. Measure what truly moves the business: speed, adaptability, and impact.
- Design for Independence. Build operations that learn, adapt, and scale without adding complexity.
Every time your teams send a prompt to someone else’s model, you’re training tomorrow’s competitors—and paying for the privilege. The new race isn’t for data; it’s for control over intelligence itself. And most enterprises are losing it quietly, one API call at a time.
Because the future doesn’t belong to the companies that adopt AI the fastest. It belongs to the ones that own the way they learn.
- Stop Training Your Competitors. Every external prompt is a leak of intellectual capital.
- Build Intelligence You Own. Sovereignty means designing data, models, and workflows that stay yours.
- Dependency Is the New Risk. When everyone uses the same few models, creativity collapses into consensus.
- Sovereigns vs. Subjects. The next divide won’t be digital—it’ll be who controls their intelligence layer.