By Megan Weis.
Productivity gains will accelerate U.S. economic growth this year, according to the chief economist at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. This acceleration is driven by more business use of AI to address worker shortages and make employees more productive. That increased productivity has the potential to enhance growth, wages and profit margins.
With talent shortages driving AI adoption, it’s not surprising that many companies are also continuing to outsource business processes or even increasing their outsourcing to overcome staffing issues. The Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) market will exceed $152 billion in revenue this year, driven in part by increased demand for cost-effective solutions. Moreover, AI innovation in the BPO space is making many outsourcing partners more productive, as well.
Implementing AI along with outsourcing can amplify the productivity benefits and other positives that each strategy offers individually. Different industries are at different points of maturity in terms of AI and outsourcing, so it can be helpful to look at several to get a sense of what’s possible. The gains can be especially robust in industries with chronic talent shortages, such as accounting and cybersecurity, and in high-turnover industries like customer care.
Finance and accounting: automating processes and improving accuracy
The accounting industry is dealing with a yearslong decline in new graduates in the field, so outsourcing is already widely practiced. Eighty-three percent of senior leaders surveyed in 2024 said they had a shortage of accounting talent, while another survey of CFOs found that 90% were outsourcing “at least some accounting functions” in 2024. The survey also found that leaders in the field are cautiously approaching AI. AI-backed automation of rote tasks and standardized processes is the most common AI use case that some finance organizations have already implemented. Major global accounting firms, meanwhile, are leading the way in using AI to automate document review and support audit teams to reduce the risk of errors.
By layering these AI use cases with outsourcing for basic accounting processes, finance and accounting organizations can reduce employee workloads, which in turn reduces the risk of errors and attrition. When employees have more time to spend on high value tasks, they can build stronger relationships with customers and grow their professional skills. All of these improvements can boost productivity by reducing inefficiencies and penalties related to errors and improving employee engagement and retention.
Cybersecurity: improving performance and reducing burnout
The cybersecurity industry also faces a global talent shortage, due in part to the rapid growth in the number of available roles. As with accounting, many organizations outsource at least some of their security functions, often to managed security service providers (MSSPs) that take on complex, high volume tasks like network monitoring, threat detection, investigation, and response. Cybersecurity has been at the forefront of AI adoption, leveraging AI’s pattern recognition and analytics capabilities to sift through suspicious activity, user reports, and other data to respond appropriately and quickly enough to prevent or limit the impact of attacks.
Currently, combining AI with outsourcing allows companies to automate many so-called Level 1 (basic) security tasks and free up in-house security analysts to address more complex challenges. Freedom from a treadmill of urgent tasks also gives analysts time to build new skills to advance their careers, strengthen their employers’ overall talent base, and reduce the burnout that affects more than 60% of security professionals. The use of outsourcing and AI to maintain cybersecurity staffing levels and productivity will become even more important as attackers increasingly use AI for their own purposes, such as crafting email attacks on companies and government agencies that are difficult or impossible for non-AI security solutions to detect.
Customer care: faster resolution times, better customer and employee experience
AI and outsourcing are helping the customer care industry overcome some long standing challenges like employee turnover, wait times, resolution rates, and customer satisfaction. A recent survey found that the customer care sector is combining AI use cases and outsourcing in innovative ways to improve customer satisfaction, update technology, and enhance the employee experience.
Many customer care organizations already use AI chatbots and email autoresponders to interact with customers, and many also use AI to automate business processes and run analytics. In addition, AI tools can support customer care agents with training and by helping them during calls. For example, a tech company customer care agent with AI support doesn’t have to manually search a database for the correct product documentation among thousands of options. Instead, AI can show them the information they need in real time. At the same time, the survey found that customer care leaders are “building stronger outsourcing relationships” that often go beyond staffing to include services like content management and the development of AI tools for customer care agents.
AI-as-a-Service: Outsourcing AI challenges
The outsourcing of AI solution development in customer care is part of an emerging trend. Managed service providers and other vendors that offer customized AI integrations allow organizations across multiple industries to outsource their AI development, so they can implement AI for productivity without the need to source new AI talent or to divert internal AI teams from existing projects.
Many companies have experience finding reliable outsourcing partners, but developing AI tools presents new and more complex hurdles. IBM’s most recent Global AI Adoption Index found that a shortage of AI skills and an excess of data complexity top the list of enterprise issues with adopting AI. For GenAI use cases, data privacy and trust are also major concerns. Working with an AI-as-a-Service partner is one way that organizations can address the challenges that combining AI and outsourcing can pose.
As productivity accelerates, the gap between organizations that use AI and outsourcing effectively and those that don’t will widen. Positioning for long-term success now requires using these resources to improve operational efficiency and to support and develop talent. Strategically combining AI and outsourcing has the potential to transform organizations’ productivity now through automation, and to make work more rewarding, which can improve productivity through better employee engagement over the long term.
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Megan Weis is VP and General Manager of FAO Services at Personiv.
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