From Capacity Crunches to AI Anxiety: Navigating Support’s Biggest Shifts with Lukasz Bargielowski

F5's Lukasz Bargielowski on leading support through the AI revolution, balancing tough trade-offs, and building a culture of continuous improvement

The role of a global support leader is no longer just about maintaining service levels, but about orchestrating a cultural and operational shift where AI and human expertise coexist—a challenge that demands a unique blend of strategic foresight and empathetic people leadership.

To test this hypothesis, we spoke with Lukasz Bargielowski, Senior Director of Global Support EMEA at F5. With a career defined by building high-performing teams and navigating complex operational landscapes, Lukasz offers a rare perspective on what it takes to lead through uncertainty.

In this candid conversation, we explore how he balances the breakneck speed of AI adoption with the human need for security, the art of making "BOLD" decisions without breaking team morale, and why a "healthy skepticism" is now a critical job requirement.

Interview Lukasz Bargielowskie

You’ve led large support organizations through periods of expansion and evolution. What has been the most impactful transformation initiative you’ve driven, and what made it work?

The most impactful transformation is happening now. AI is not only changing the way we work, but it is also changing the business landscape at an unprecedented scale. Specifically with regards to demand for talent. On the one hand, we have powerful solutions, which are reducing time required to provide solution. On the other hand, we must have skilled engineers to verify those suggestions before sending them to customers.

There is very little room for basic and low experience roles, because those activities can be automated. We need to build a new culture of curiosity and courage to test new solutions and, at the same time, build a culture of healthy scepticism to make sure we provide quality and reliability of service that our customers are expecting. And building this culture will be a key to succesful transformation.

Scaling global support often requires tough trade offs between speed, quality, and cost. What’s a leadership challenge you’ve faced in that balance, and how did you navigate it?

The biggest challenge is always related to changes affecting employees. Change is hard even for those, who are used to it. Whether we trade off speed for cost and quality or tarde off quality for cost and speed etc., change in how we used to work is inavitable and some employees will find it hard to adapt.

As a leader, I can and should help my staff understand why we are doing it. In the past, we were facing an unprecedented case volume and at the same time we had a lot of internal and external attrition due to very hot job market and business expansion. It was a tough time for those who stayed in tehir roles. My job was to agree with the team what will help us get through this, while maintaining service quality. I had to present ideas to my leaders and agree trade offs that we are willing to make. And then, share a plan and vision with my team so that they understand what are we doing and why.

Curently, I am doing the same thing trying to find balance between investing in new solutions and ways of working and addressing anxiety, because many of our engineers are concerned with their job security over AI. I am designing new workflows with my managers and will use those to illustrate a new vision of how support will operate going forward. And I am focusing big part of communication on explaining where we see our engineers in this change. Because when they will see the this, it will be much easier for them to digest and adopt a change.

You’ve overseen multilingual and multi regional teams. How do you create alignment between regional execution and global strategy while keeping performance measurable?

In organizations like Support, a lot of metrics are standardised and it helps with keeping performance measurable. Of course there are regional differences. The key is transparency of those results. I am a fan of sharing results between teams including data areound workloads, capacity and other differentiators. And I am relying on my maangers to provide additional context to those numbers so that all staff can understand reasons behind differences (if any).

It is also important to acknowledge ,when we see results below expectations, any external factors which may have influenced those. And focus all staff on areas within our direct control.

Operational change can be disruptive for teams. What has been your approach to helping people adapt while maintaining service standards?

I believe I have answered this question, and I can only add that I consider my role and my managers as change leaders. It is the essence of what we do. Change is happening all the time and everywhere, and our business and our employees are relying on us to make it as smooth and effective as possible. So to answer this question differently, I firmly believe that embracing this responsibility and having this mindset is a foundation.

It helps the team get through difficult part, when old ways of doing things are not sufficient anymore and new ways haven’t kicked in yet. I think most support leaders would agree that capacity planning is difficult. New products, new technologies, attrition, onboarding etc. Each one generates unique challenge and sometimes they accumulate creating imbalance between team capacity and workloads.

It is when change must happen rapidly and we need to present our teams with a vision to improve things. But only if we consider ourselves as change leaders our communication and actions will be truly focused on enabling our teams to adapt. Otherwise we run into risk of taking their acceptance and motivation for granted.

In roles where service excellence is critical, what differentiates teams that consistently deliver high performance from those that struggle to sustain it?

That’s a great question me and my team are asking ourselves constantly. In short, I think it is a mindset of continuous improvement. Of course, we can and we should celebrate when things are working well. But things change all the time and we need to be prepared for this. For example, we have a favorable situation in my organization where we have a good balance between workload and staffing or skills coverage.

Our engineers are getting more experienced and we have developed mechanizm to control quality of our work. At the same time, we see new trends emerging.

AI as a tool and natural tendency of some engineers to rely on it, sometimes too much. There are new skills and new technologies thet are growing and we need to learn them. Identifying those trends and preparing for them will help us maintain quality. If we just focused on here and now, our ways of doing things will become obsolete quickly. And it would be much harder to catch up!

You’ve played site leadership roles while also managing broader organizational responsibilities. How do you ensure culture, accountability, and clarity remain strong as scope increases?

You need to surround yourself by capable and engaged people. Ideally, smarter than you are ;). They will help you develop and maintain strong culture. They will hold you and themselves accountable for results. I am passionate about developing talent. Few leaders in my organization are former engineers, who have demonstarted leadership potential. By developing them to managerial roles I helped myself achieving what I just described above.

Looking ahead, what capability or mindset do you believe will matter most for global support organizations in the coming years, and why?

I think the answer lies in my previous responses. Trying to summarize I would say that it hasn’t changed a lot. Considering ourselves as change managers, evaluating trends and getting ready for them, communicating our vision clearly and focusing our efforts on team enablement to embrace the change. Taking calculated risks. These are basics, but critical and still valid in new AI era. As rapid and exciting as it is, it is just another change we need to embrace!