DHL's GBS Rewired: Bots, Agents, and 6,000 People (Frank Schüler, DHL Global Forwarding)

In this episode, Frank Schüler, Managing Director of Global Business Services at DHL Global Forwarding, shares how he leads one of the world's largest GBS organizations, supporting global operations with 6,000 people, 160 automation bots, and AI-driven innovation. He explores the rise of agentic AI, managing a hybrid workforce of people and digital workers, and the leadership principles behind building a high-performing, people-first organization.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I'm a big advocate of AI. I'm convinced that AI will change our work fundamentally going forward. Equally, I'm convinced that we urgently need to explore the new technology by applying it in real use cases, allowing ourselves to fail and to learn. Yet I'm calling out to be more realistic on the use cases. We have to focus our attention more on how to manage those new tools.

SPEAKER_01 0:34

AI will politely integrate into your GPS model. It will either transform it or expose its limits. Welcome to GPS Rewired with me, Sally Fletcher, head of thought leadership and community at Hypertest. This podcast is for GPS leaders and no incremental change isn't enough. In each episode, I sit down with the executive redefining how global business services operate in the age of AI. We challenge the big questions. Is your current GPS model built for automation or autonomy? What does an agentic GPS really look like when AI agents make decisions and not just process tasks? Where is AI delivering genuine enterprise values and where is it just hyped? And are today's GPS leaders equipped for what's coming next? If you're ready to move beyond pilots and into real transformation, you're in the right place. GBS Rewired, turning AI ambition into GBS reality. Welcome back to GBS Rewired with me, Sally Fletcher, head of thought leadership and community at Hypertest. So today's guest is Frank Schuler, the Managing Director of Global Business Services at DHL, Global Forwarding. Frank leads one of the world's largest and most sophisticated GBS organizations with a team of around 6,000 people supporting operations across the globe and processing more than 180,000 service tickets every day. Under his leadership, DHL has built an impressive automation capability with a virtual delivery centre operating around 160 bots that help streamline processes at scale. More recently, Frank has been at the forefront of exploring how artificial intelligence and the gentic AI can work alongside automation to transform GBS, creating new opportunities while redefining how organizations manage a workforce made up of people, bots, and AI agents. And we're going to dig into that a little bit today. Beyond technology, Frank is passionate about building high-performing teams and a people-first culture. That commitment has been reflected in DHL's recognition as a great place to work in 124 countries and its continued recognition in the SSON Research and Analytics top 20 most admired GBS. So they're definitely a great person to have on the podcast.

SPEAKER_00 3:14

Good morning, Sally, and thank you so much. Happy to be here.

SPEAKER_01 3:18

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I know we've uh we've done a podcast before, so it's great to have you back to interview you again. Um so I'm gonna dig into it straight away. Um, I mean, as I said from the top, you process over 180,000 tickets daily and have 6,000 people in your GBS. That is quite a large number. How do you manage such a large global organization? I can't even imagine.

SPEAKER_00 3:43

Well, I have to say I I feel really privileged to lead an incredible team of highly motivated and engaged employees. All our people are really focused on delivering the service we commit to our business partners. And with that, I'm actually also extremely proud that we are not only receiving outstanding employer engagement scores from our employees, but as you rightfully said, we are also being recognized from external great place to work as being certified as a great place to work across all our six centers globally. So I'm really happy about that. And uh it is in the end all about our people.

SPEAKER_01 4:27

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we talk about AI a lot, but you know, with such a big scale, it's really important to have the leadership but also the managers in place that can inspire people, that can lead people, that can go in the right direction, that can think strategically, um, but also keep an eye on those transactions. Um so that that's great. So um let's look a little bit about the digital transformation because obviously the the theme of the podcast is all about how GBS is transforming in the in the age of AI. I know you have currently around 160 bots in your virtual delivery center. Um talk us through what they do and how that center actually works.

SPEAKER_00 5:06

Yes, happy to do so. So we have a centralized virtual delivery center actually based out of Chennai, from where we are actually supporting all our automation activities across the organization. So far, we have uh delivered various automations. First of all, over the last years, um based on rule-based automations, meaning RPA, supporting actually all kinds of functions, reconciling numbers, performing logistics tasks, and so on. The impact of those RPA-based um automations is of about 500 FTEs and efficiency releases actually to date. Now, this has now been actually complemented more and more through AI-enabled process automation tools, like IDP tools or voice ports. These are now being delivering already 150 to 200 additional um efficiency gains into our organization.

SPEAKER_01 6:12

That's really impressive. And I think it's also what struck me is how you're able to quantify the benefit because quite often we speak to people and it's like, oh yeah, I put in bots, but they find it really hard to quantify the downstream benefit of the automation beyond just saying, oh, I've reduced cost per invoice from like $9 to $2 or whatever. Can I ask you how you like calculate that? How you quantify the impact of your automation?

SPEAKER_00 6:39

Yeah, sure. For me, this is absolutely crucial. Uh, because in the end, what are what is shared services about? Shared services is about actually work consolidation and driving in efficiency releases in actually how you perform the work. And therefore, you need to, when you design already the process automation, you need to think about what you will actually deliver in the end. So we have designed for that uh several years back a process which we call idea to robot, where we actually start in an uh in an initial uh in in the idea generation phase to identify already what would be the realistic impact of the automation. Then we set that ourselves as a case, as a business case in the end. Then we configure the automation while we monitor actually will we achieve that. And eventually, when we are live in uh in production, we measure again whether actually this business, this benefit case, has been realized. Therefore, for all our automations, we have the exact measurements on what is actually the output of the change which we brought into the organization, and how much work could we actually, in particular of repetitive work, could we release away from our workforce and therefore refocus the work of our workforce to more value-adding tasks.

SPEAKER_01 8:10

Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, thank you for sharing. And you know, in the previous question, you touched a little bit on how you're augmenting um automation with IDP, for example. You know, have you been using AI and can you delve a little bit deeper into that?

SPEAKER_00 8:27

Well, yes, sure. So IDP is already on AI, voice bots is also on AI, and so on, right? So I believe today you hear a little bit too much about AI without being actually specific on where do we apply artificial intelligence for which tools. And so you see now for us in the ITP case, where um the AI is applied to actually have a template-free reading of any kind of page, so meaning OCR technology enabled by AI. We are applying that actually in large scale across various processes for us. Another good case is also voice bots. Voice bots, which are also enabled again by AI, which we're using now for cash collection and for other activities, so directly actually having AI calling our customer, you can say. Thirdly, we are also exploring and implementing now tools where we use AI then for reasoning, to actually decide and make or prepare actually decision making, always then handing over then at the end to a to human in the loop to make the final confirmation to proceed.

SPEAKER_01 9:47

Yeah, that's really interesting. Um, yeah, I think it's always better to have the human in the loop at the end. There's a lot of talk about governance at the moment, like who should be owning the process, who should be owning the work instructions, who should be making the final decision, whether it's human in the loop, on the loop, off the loop. Um so yeah, it's interesting to see your perspective on that as well. Delving a little bit more into kind of the people side, GBS organizations, as we said in in the intro, are becoming increasingly blended with a mix of AI agents, bots, and human employees. How do you manage hybrid workforce? Um what does it mean for training and accountability?

SPEAKER_00 10:28

Yeah, I see. Uh if if I look back, it was actually about eight years back when we started our journey on RPA and our virtual delivery center that we came up with our concept of holistic workforce management. You see, if in my humble view, shared services is all about work consolidation in the end. And if you look back many years when actually shared services came up, it was all about actually bringing a lot of many employees together in low-cost environments, usually, and put actually the work on many shoulders and then actually optimize how you can perform the work. Then eight, ten years back, RPA came up. And with that, rule-based process automation tools which complemented our human workforces. Therefore, you had first time actually two categories, as you could say, of resources, human resources and virtual resources, and you had the need to orchestrate actually the workload going across it. Nowadays, um, these resources are being complemented by non-deterministic automation tools based on AI, or as they also quite often are called, agentic AI. So today you have actually three categories of uh of resources: human-based, deterministic or RPA-based process automation, and certainly non-deterministic process automation or agentic AI. I strongly believe that in our environment of shared services, in future, humans shall lead the work consolidation. Our bots, meaning our deterministic work consolidation, will perform the deterministic workload. And our AI-based components will evaluate, will prepare decision making by actually leveraging those non-deterministic process automations. But you're absolutely right. This means also that our employees need to be upskilled, they need to be enabled to lead such a holistic workforce. They will need to understand the technology and they need to manage non-deterministic tools. Tools which are not, as I would say, um having a black or white outcome. They have an outcome which is more a shade of gray. But therefore, again, also in this non-deterministic world world, it is very similar, like a human being. So it is again going back to what we are doing already all those years, consolidating workload.

SPEAKER_01 13:19

Yeah, that's really interesting because I think we definitely have to be careful of, I think the term is rubber stamping, like you know, when the bot is correct 98% of the time, not just always approving what the bot spouts out without looking at it, because I definitely can get to that point where you're just like, yeah, it's fine, it's fine, it's fine. Um, and and start kind of just approving on autopilot. Um, how long do you think it's gonna take to get to this kind of like new GBS? Maybe five years, ten years, longer? Space is different for every GBS.

SPEAKER_00 13:53

Yeah, I I think it will it will be a journey. And um I see already it's starting happening. So for us, we um actually all our process automation, being deterministic or non-deterministic, are getting into our entire uh holistic workforce management already as of today. So, meaning our service management tool actually assigns the task to those three different categories of workforce. Now, over the years, that will become more and more sophisticated. Over the years, we will be build also more confidence on the non-deterministic tools, and that will allow us again to actually give them more autonomous uh environments. Yeah, so it will change over the time. The impact I strongly believe will be big, um, but it will not go overnight either. So it will be a journey on which has started already.

SPEAKER_01 14:51

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Um, so you went to Shed Seven Outsourcing Week Lisbon, run by SSON, and I know that you spoke about the business case for agentic AI. Can you tell us a little bit more about your perspective here?

SPEAKER_00 15:08

Yeah, um so I'm what I'm observing is a bit of a hype of AI. Yeah. I'm observing that the objective of process automation often seems to become secondary, while it becomes a primary focus to apply AI, whatever it takes, as I would call it. You see, I'm a big advocate of AI since I have written my PhD on AI about 30 years ago. I'm convinced that AI will change our work fundamentally going forward. Equally, I'm convinced that we urgently need to explore the new technology by applying it in real use cases, allowing ourselves to fail and to learn. Yet I'm calling out to be more realistic on the use cases. We have to focus our attention more on how to manage those new tools. We have to focus our attention on how we will control the output of these non-deterministic tools. How do we manage this shade of gray coming out? We have to focus on the increasing cost for applying AI. The token costs will become a major issue and concern once we scale the solutions globally across many use cases. While working on process automation, we have to refocus again our attention on the process first and utmost. In my experience, it's about 80% of any process automation can still be addressed via deterministic tools, cheaper and better to be controlled. It is only 20% which would require non-deterministic tools. Thus, my call out is let us focus our attention on a thorough review and design of the process which needs to be automated rather than overemphasizing the technology to be applied.

SPEAKER_01 17:25

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And I think we definitely see an increased focus and importance of the global process owner and having that end-to-end process, as you said, streamlined, um, improved, and then eventually automated when it when it is ready to be. So my last question before I let you go, Frank, um, is we talked in the intro about, you know, DHL has been certified as a great place to work in 124 countries, which is absolutely phenomenal. Um, I know that the GBS is in about maybe six or seven of them. Um, you know, can you give me maybe three brief reasons why you think this is? So how do you how do you get to be a great place to work?

SPEAKER_00 18:10

Yeah, my view in at least in our environment, as you're rightfully saying we are uh based in actually in five countries with six uh centers, which we are having. You need to focus on on three core elements. One is first of all you need to provide trust into the organization uh and trust to for the the the employees that you're able to lead in a future with a clear vision and transparency on what this would mean for each individual. Secondly, you need to engage with every individual across all levels, listen to various viewpoints and act on it. Provide your employees a purpose of what they are doing. And thirdly, I strongly believe we need to provide a home. We need to build a home through providing a sense of belonging and comradeship for all employees. So those would be my three um thoughts, actually, I would say.

SPEAKER_01 19:23

Yeah, no, I agree. You're in your you're at work a long time in the week, like you know, if you're full-time, maybe 40 hours, probably more. Um, and that is an incredibly large amount of time over the course of a year. If you're not enjoying it, if you're not feeling like it's got purpose, if it's not worth it in your mind, then it can be incredibly demoralizing. So yeah, I completely agree. Um agree with that. Well, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast, Frank. I've really enjoyed our discussion. Um, and I hope you will come back and join us again soon.

SPEAKER_00 19:56

Thank you so much, uh, my pleasure. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_01 20:02

Thanks for joining us on GBS Rewired. The future of Global Business Services is being shaped right now by leaders willing to question, experiment, and evolve. If today's conversation is about new ideas, share it with your team or a fellow GBS leader and keep the dialogue going inside your organization. To stay connected on the podcast, join the hypertified community on LinkedIn or add me personally, Sally Fletcher, and we will continue the conversation, share insights and spotlights and practical examples of AI in action. Subscribe to the show so you don't miss the next episode and join us each fortnight as we explore what's possible when AI and GBS come together with clarity and purpose. GBS Rewired turning AI ambition into GBS reality.