For the last three decades, companies have sent their IT grunt work to offshore IT providers. Sure, these ‘consultancies’ offer high-end knowledge work and leadership, but their primary business model is based on providing cheap workers who can crack on with stuff while European and American workers are tucked up in bed.

Call me cynical, but I don’t think this model will survive too long in the AI era.

Historical Examples of Technological Impact

It goes without saying that, throughout history, technology has changed everything about the workplace and had transformative consequences for society at large:

The Printing Press (15^th Century): All of a sudden, this simple technology came along, and boom… the world changed. Books became relatively easy to make and in massive numbers. Gone were jobs for scribes, but in came the democratisation of knowledge, the standardisation of language, and the acceleration of basically every field of human endeavour.

Textile Looms (18^th Century): Again, technology took over from skilled artisans, this time weavers. Understandably, this upset quite a few of them, but despite the luddite movement, textiles became much easier, faster, and cheaper to produce, leading to the commoditisation of previously luxury items. However, it also led to increased child labour and sweatshops.

Automotive Production Lines (20^th Century): Similar story, but this time it was the mass-production of cars. Clearly, the mass adoption of cars had an incredible impact on society. Aside from the immeasurable knock-on effects, production lines also created direct jobs in the automotive industry, but a lot of these were relatively low-skilled assembly roles, which were eventually replaced by robots or sent offshore.

Supermarket Checkouts (21^st Century): A great current example is supermarkets replacing traditional checkouts and their operatives with self-checkouts and smart shopping. Unfortunately, this example doesn’t lead to any real democratisation or empowerment of the masses, apart from reduced time in checkout queues. The only real winners here are the supermarkets, which will cut costs. As with all tech advancements, there are plenty of people out there hoping that this particular little revolution will fail. It won’t.

AI Will Change The World

One consistent theme throughout these technical revolutions is the reduced need for people. Why pay staff when technology can do the job for you? Businesses exist to make money, simple as that.

So now we’re at the dawn of a new technological revolution, and it’s a biggy. AI is here, and much like the printing press, it will change the world in ways we can’t even imagine.

We do know that AI will create opportunity and democratise technology. It has already led to new jobs and advancements, and we can again expect leaps in every area of human endeavour. Be it technology, healthcare, living standards, warfare, politics, space exploration, who knows, even time travel (you never know).

Unfortunately, AI will also wipe out many current jobs. Of course, these jobs won’t be limited to any one particular field, but my guess is that AI will impact outsourcers more than most.

AI solutions are in their infancy but are already, and increasingly, adept at handling the IT grunt work we currently send offshore. They will only get better.

The Natural Progression: From Offshore to AI

Moving from outsourcing to AI is natural and expected. Moving work offshore is done to reduce costs; god knows it isn’t about doing things better, increasing quality, or driving innovation. And now, AI provides a better way to reduce costs.

It was advancements in technology that allowed companies to offshore these tasks in the first place. Improvements to telephony, greater connectivity and the fact that work was increasingly done on computers meant that companies reduced their reliance on local staff.

And now, advancements in technology are allowing companies to reduce their reliance on offshore staff in much the same way.

Also, let’s face it: working with many of these outsourcing providers is like working with AIs.

I’ve had so many experiences where I’ve provided a detailed breakdown of actions, left for the night, and returned the next day to find that nothing has been done. A lot of that was down to my fault: I did not provide an exact explanation of what needed to happen, when, and by whom.

Figuring out how to convey information to outsourcers was a great primer for learning prompt engineering. But I digress…

The Shift to AI is Already Happening

This shift from outsourcers to AI is not just theoretical; we can already see it. Call centres are a case in point; just look at this article from The Register in 2022.

Once upon a time, call centres were local operations. When you rang one, the person who answered was generally in the same country as you.

Then, over time, these were increasingly moved offshore for no other reason than cost. This caused outrage, certainly among tabloid newspapers and conversations at the pub, but companies cracked on, because it saved money.

For a while, it looked like automated services might replace these offshore call centres, but the real change came when companies started using AI chatbots, and people didn’t need to call at all.

I mean, who wants to wait in a queue on the phone anyway? We’re all online all the time, so it’s much easier to just open up a chat on a browser.

The End of One Era and The Beginning of Another

Of course, chatbots haven’t and won’t completely remove the need for people to answer calls, but they do drastically reduce the number needed.

Such is the volume of staff reductions, that companies can again employ local experts to answer the phones while AI picks up the standard interactions.

And this, again, is a great case in point for the future of work in the coming AI era. While there will be less of a need for bums in seats, there will be an increased demand for certain roles.

We’ll increasingly need people who can find innovative and effective ways to deploy AI, experts who can guide the process and communicate effectively with AIs, skilled artisans who can take AI outputs and craft them into something special, and human beings who can interact effectively with consumers.

Like previous technological advancements, nobody knows where AI will lead us and what this AI era will look like. I can promise you that it will shake things up, and not just for outsourcers.