Only about 7% of offshore business support workers are concerned that the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) will negatively affect their roles.
According to a survey of 2,000 offshore-based employees at services specialist Sourcefit, just over half (53%) of offshore workers said they use AI several times a week and 74% use it occasionally.
Over two-thirds (68%) said AI tools increase their productivity, and 41% believe the technology will support their roles without fundamentally changing them.
These findings provide further evidence that while non-IT business professionals in the middle of their careers face the most disruption from generative AI (GenAI), professionals in the IT services sector and their employers are prepared for change.
The survey also revealed that the most common uses of AI by offshore staff are writing and documentation (36%), research and analysis (30%), and customer support (14%). The results show that 66% feel confident using AI on a daily basis, with only 3% reporting discomfort.
While AI has been seen as a way to replace certain roles in business processes and IT services, including offshore jobs, service providers are attempting to adopt AI to improve the performance of their staff.
Andy Schachtel, CEO of Sourcefit, is banking on this. “These professionals are using AI, and it is making them better and more confident in their jobs,” he said. “When your offshore team and your onshore team have access to the same AI tools, the gap in output quality narrows. AI is actually an equaliser between local and offshore staff. The offshore team becomes more competitive, not less.”
He is not alone. Indian suppliers, which grew through providing large businesses in the US and the UK with low-cost offshore staff, are harnessing AI.
Hexaware, a Tier 2 Indian firm with 30,000 staff, presents an example of how things are changing. Amrinder Singh, head of EMEA at Hexaware, told Computer Weekly last year that the company has a self-imposed target for AI delivery.
“One of the vision statements we have is that by 2030 we want nearly 50% of our work to be delivered, and revenue generated, through digital labour, not just human labour,” he said.
This, added Singh, does not mean the human workforce will be smaller. On the contrary, with the growth of the industry fuelled by AI projects, more staff will be needed, he said. But he admitted the growth of the human workforce may slow down.
Singh voiced a warning: “There is no future for single-skilled people. Unless you are multi-skilled with domain understanding, as well as an understanding of how to use AI and technology, you will not survive,” he said.
A whitepaper published last year by the Centre for Finance, Technology and Entrepreneurship, titled The AI-fication of talents, said three groups of professionals will emerge in the era of AI. It reported that there will be “mass displacement” of roles centred on execution which will be increasingly automated; that “supercharged professionals” will emerge who use AI to expand scope and scale; and there will be a small group of “creative disruptors” inventing new models, products and systems.
