Global business leader Anis Chenchah: “I call the AI era the ode to expertise”

I arrived at Aqua on the 31^st floor of the Shard to interview Anis Chenchah, Global CEO of Teamwill, with a prepared list of questions, but didn’t need them.

Chenchah, who became Global CEO in January 2026 talked for the best part of ninety minutes, giving his view of current developments in the global IT services industry; AI; and the shift from ownership to usership that he believes will reshape the economy.

His career provides the context. Twenty-five years in IT services, the majority at Capgemini, where he built deep roots in financial services: managing director for the Middle East, then for France, before joining the Group Executive Committee as CEO of Capgemini Business Services, a global business line of 25,000 people and $1 billion in revenue. He left to run Wipro’s Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa division, a business of 35,000 people and $1.4 billion in revenue. Then came Teamwill, with its ~ 800 specialist consultants. His bet on where value is migrating.

Experts rule

Chenchah argues that the IT services industry is going through its third major disruption in twenty-five years. The first was offshoring: between 2000 and 2010, a cohort of Indian IT firms, led by TCS, went from businesses of a few hundred million dollars to multi-billion dollar global leaders, profoundly transforming the industry landscape in the process.

The second was digital transformation. It saw specialised digital engineering firms rise to fame. EPAM, then a little-known firm, originally from Belarus, became a defining success story of that era within a few years.

“A good way to measure the depth of a disruption is to see how many dominant players have disappeared and how many unknown ones have become global leaders.”

And according to Chenchah, AI is about to produce the same pattern, but faster: “At least the same level of profound change as offshoring, probably more than digital, in a timeframe twice as quick.”

This creates a unique challenge for large IT services firms. Their economics rest on three pillars: pyramid, utilisation, and geographic labour arbitrage. When AI can write documentation and code faster, better, and cheaper than large teams of offshore junior engineers, the pillars crumble.

To make the point, Chenchah picks up his phone and shows me stock prices: Leading Consulting & IT firms – whether with western or Indian origins – down over 40% in two years. He believes that the disruption creating new threats for IT generalists was creating precisely the opposite conditions for a different kind of firm.

The second half of his argument explains where he went. “AI is the super amplifier of expertise. Productivity gains of two times, three times, five times, ten times for expert practitioners.”

For the generalist IT services firm, there’s the opportunity to become marginally more capable in various ways. But for the true expert, this is the moment to leverage that specialist knowledge, and to become dramatically more productive.

“If you have a company whose identity is built upon domain and functional expertise, which has been doing that for twenty years and only that, and you can amplify it with AI, then you have an opportunity. If in addition that expertise is in a niche market where the entry ticket is difficult, then you probably have a very good opportunity to play.”

“And that is a key reason why I joined Teamwill,” Chenchah revealed.

AI adoption

An MIT study last year found more than 90% of companies across all industries describe their AI posture as experimental and stuck at pilot stage.

The answer is not more tooling.

He describes what Teamwill did when it began its own AI journey in June 2025. The first problem was shadow AI – staff using consumer tools outside any governance framework. That was solved by selecting a single enterprise-wide platform and locking out other tools.

The second decision was not to build. Teamwill became a design partner to a specialist start-up, contributing asset-finance domain knowledge in exchange for early access to agentic capability. “You will not improvise a champion of AI platforms. Be strong in what you know. Let others who are strong in these areas help you.”

The early results on well-defined tasks are unambiguous: report query generation is 80% faster; test cycle preparation has fallen from 90 minutes to 15; daily active AI usage has exceeded 40% in under a year.

And then there is the challenge of making AI work in a regulated environment: “Think of AI agents as the clones of human beings. Very smart. Freshly graduated. Hard workers. But they do not know your business. You need to teach them with information that is curated.” Where documentation is good, results are exceptional. Where it is poor, outputs are too random to be useful. No AI output reaches a client without human review.

“My biggest fear is that people get accustomed to trusting AI and stop exercising control.”

It is why Chenchah identifies governance as the most important single element, with a Chief AI and Transformation Officer at executive committee level, an essential for lenders. “These are top-down initiatives. You cannot delegate them.”

Vendor-led implementations

In most large enterprise technology markets, the software vendor is only part of the implementation story. Around every major platform (SAP, Salesforce, Oracle etc.), an entire ecosystem of implementation partners has grown up. Specialist lending works differently. Here, vendors implement their own software, and it is so embedded in how the market operates that few people question it.

“They are compensating for a vacuum. There are not enough Teamwills in this industry,” Chenchah says.

The reason is scale. The specialist Finance and Leasing market is too niche to attract the large consultancies that serve broader financial services. Asset-finance vendors fill the gap. But a software vendor is not a service company. The cultures, incentive structures and capabilities are fundamentally different.

“Transformations fail for people reasons. Not because the technology cannot be delivered. Change management gets underestimated. Cultural factors get ignored. And there are cases of vendors over-promising – and lenders believing in them.”

He notes that the market has a natural advantage it does not fully exploit. “Everybody knows everybody. It is quite feasible, maybe even easy, to call colleagues and ask which vendors have been reliable, which have not, what the lessons were. Before making a big decision.” That opportunity, in his experience, remains underused.

Outcome-based pricing

At Teamwill, Chenchah is backing his argument with a new pricing model that changes how the company charges for its work. The model has three tiers: cost recovery, a margin tied to delivering the promised outcome, and a success fee tied to whether the client’s business has been measurably improved beyond the original commitment. “If I don’t deliver the outcomes, I make zero margin. I start making margin as I deliver them. And there is an additional fee if the client exceeds their expectations,” he explains.

Verifying the third tier requires open-book accounting. It is not offered to every client. “This is a strategic partnership. We want a small number of clients with whom we have a long-term, sustainable relationship. We would never sign up for anything we are not going to deliver.”

The vendor ecosystem

Teamwill works with more than twenty specialist technology vendors. The natural question for any Finance Company considering an engagement is whether that depth of vendor relationship is compatible with the independence, Chenchah claims.

He is aware of it. “We have our own benchmarks. Clients come to us and ask: for this business challenge, which software do you recommend? We give them a view. And then the arbitration between the options is the client’s decision. We would never recommend something we do not believe in. Because if it fails, we fail with it.”

Where the market is heading

Teamwill has a high penetration in continental Europe and has made early progress in North America. “The UK is the next adjacent market. That gap needs to be closed quickly,” Chenchah explains. Closing it requires more than presence. “You want to be Roman in Rome. Business transformation is deeply cultural. We must be British in Britain.”

Our conversation ends with an observation about the market itself. Chenchah has been noticing more investment activity and M&A in finance and leasing than in any other part of financial services. He believes the cause is a multi-factor shift from ownership to usership: demographic changes, consumer behaviour of younger generations, and physical goods becoming software-intensive, all calling for financial products fit for “pay-per-use.”

“Leasing could become the mainstream of tomorrow’s financial services”

It is a large claim for a market many of its participants still describe as a backwater. But that is exactly how specialist lending looked to the large generalist IT firms that chose not to serve it; it is why Teamwill exists, and why Chenchah believes the moment it was built for has arrived.

WHAT TEAMWILL DOES

Consulting Helping lenders define what they need before committing to a technology investment – addressing business problems rather than assuming technology answers.

System Integration End-to-end implementation and integration of specialist lending platforms covering credit origination, asset management, collections and the complete lending lifecycle.

Managed services Ongoing operational responsibility for live systems, and business processes: maintenance, integration management, updates, automation and internal team support.

Founded in Paris in 2004, Teamwill has ~ 800 consultants across eight countries and has served over 200 clients across asset finance, auto finance, personal finance, corporate lending, mobility and factoring.