A new thesis is circulating in boardrooms: that agentic AI makes it feasible to dissolve Global Business Services (GBS) and send work back to the functions. This report argues that dissolution is wrong across every dimension that matters: structural, financial, legal, regulatory, and historical. The one-time restructuring cost alone lands at 20–40% of annual GBS run cost, with recurring annual value cannibalization of 65–100% and a permanent unit-cost penalty of 70–110 basis points of revenue. Every large-enterprise attempt to diassolve a centralized services backbone in the last 20 years has been reversed within 5–7 years at 2–3x the original cost. The only defensible play is to reposition GBS as the enterprise AI Control Tower; keeping the backbone, steeling it with AI, and freeing the functions through orchestration.
