How AI Will Disrupt Outsourced Work (a16z.com) 15
AI startups are poised to disrupt the $300 billion business process outsourcing (BPO) industry, as advances in language models and voice technology enable automation of tasks traditionally handled by human workers.
The BPO market, which reached $300 billion in 2024 and is projected to hit $525 billion by 2030, faces mounting pressure from AI companies offering faster, more scalable alternatives to manual processing of customer support, IT services and financial claims, venture capital firm a16z wrote in a thesis post. Early AI implementations have shown promising results, with customer service startup Decagon reporting 80% resolution rates and improved satisfaction scores. In healthcare, AI company Juniper said its clients saw 80% fewer insurance claim denials and 50% faster processing times.
Major BPO providers are responding to the threat, with Wipro reporting a 140% increase in AI adoption across projects and Infosys deploying over 100 AI agents. However, industry analysts say BPOs face structural challenges in transitioning from their labor-based business model to AI-first operations. The shift threatens traditional BPO companies like Cognizant, Infosys and Wipro, which reported revenues between $10-20 billion in their latest fiscal years.
The BPO market, which reached $300 billion in 2024 and is projected to hit $525 billion by 2030, faces mounting pressure from AI companies offering faster, more scalable alternatives to manual processing of customer support, IT services and financial claims, venture capital firm a16z wrote in a thesis post. Early AI implementations have shown promising results, with customer service startup Decagon reporting 80% resolution rates and improved satisfaction scores. In healthcare, AI company Juniper said its clients saw 80% fewer insurance claim denials and 50% faster processing times.
Major BPO providers are responding to the threat, with Wipro reporting a 140% increase in AI adoption across projects and Infosys deploying over 100 AI agents. However, industry analysts say BPOs face structural challenges in transitioning from their labor-based business model to AI-first operations. The shift threatens traditional BPO companies like Cognizant, Infosys and Wipro, which reported revenues between $10-20 billion in their latest fiscal years.
Re: Not sure how they see this as a win (Score:2)
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I can see why you posted that as AC. Healthcare should never have a $billion a month middle man taking money out the healthcare system! Making it a system that doesn't even employ people, so having absolutely zero value return, makes the worst system even worse.
Which seems to be the end-goal of insurance industry management. If they can create a system that is 100% money extraction with zero benefits for anyone but the C suite? They win. Who cares if the rest of society loses?
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If the system starts having no value, nobody will subscribe to it. The goal of the insurance company appears to be so SEEM to produce be of large value while having to pay off as little as possible. Some companies definitely do this by making fraudulent promises about their coverage, and not paying off unless essentially challenged in court, but such companies also have to change their names frequently, of people start avoiding them.
Utter nonsense (Score:3, Insightful)
In healthcare, AI company Juniper said its clients saw 80% fewer insurance claim denials and 50% faster processing times.
That's almost certainly a lie. Insurance companies tend to want to deny claims. "Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral; for this conception of it, to which today we particularly like to do homage, makes us utterly blind to the essence of technology." is how Heidegger said it.
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>> The key here is "will" placing it squarely in the future.
Apparently you didn't read the linked article.
"AI-native companies are already going after BPO spend, and many of them are growing at unprecedented rates. These companies know they need to build defensible products to stay ahead of both incumbent and startup competition, but the early evidence from customers — both the high demand and the evident customer love — mean that they’ll have a clear opportunity to build deeper prod
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But on the other hand, "The time at our disposal each day is elastic; the passions we feel dilate it, those that inspire us shrink it, and habit fills it" is what Proust said, so you are right.
So calling for help gets worse? (Score:4, Insightful)
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And all their app has is the very same AI chatbot.
Re:So calling for help gets worse? (Score:5, Interesting)
There have been useless support chatbots, text and audio, for a long time. This will make them more wordy and insistent on only them having solved your problem. Life's about to get much worse.
Good fucking luck speaking to a human ever again. I guess the millennials and zoomers will love it.
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Bullshit. The old chatbots were and are absolute trash: Glorified forms + glorified FAQ searchers.
LLMs are heavenly compared to that. Just talk to them normally and they get what you're trying to achieve, don't follow some circuitous script and get straight to the point.
Go ahead: Whenever you have a question where you'd normally want to contact the support department of some organization, just ask the question to a general frontier LLM. Even such a general LLM is going to be way more helpful, let alone one
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>> everyone gets to talk to an AI at the support desk
It could be a much better experience. I've been interacting with AI's recently and they respond in complete sentences, can usually infer what I was saying even if I wasn't very clear, and have immediate access to information that a human would normally have to spend time looking up. It should be at least as good as some low-payed call center flunky who hates their job and for good reason.
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While that's faint praise indeed, I think it's too high. OTOH, the last time I called it WAS easier to get through to a real tech, even if the AI was otherwise useless.
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From my experience with foreign support people, and with AI, AI will be a vast improvement.