AI-powered contact center solutions threaten the existence of traditional business process outsourcing providers.
Human labor is the backbone of BPOs. Companies outsource to BPOs to reduce their customer service and support costs, as BPOs employ contact center employees in markets where staff costs are typically lower.
Generative and agentic AI-powered solutions threaten that model by promising a reduced need for people to serve as the first point of contact in service interactions. AI tools could automate the entire service portion of the customer experience.
With fewer people potentially needed, some BPOs see the proverbial writing on the wall and are beginning to reinvent themselves in preparation for that future.
“You have a choice in life,” said Jarrod Johnson, chief customer officer with TaskUs, speaking at the Regal Rise conference earlier this month. “Are you going to be a laggard and hold on to what you have, or are you going to lean in and be a part of where your customers are going?”
For TaskUs, there’s a lot at stake.
The BPO’s digital customer experience service division comprised 57% of the $309 million it reported in total service revenue in Q2 2026. Its CX services include omnichannel care, tech support, sales and customer success, and it employs more than 63,000 people worldwide, many of whom are agents.
Brands are headed toward a world in which AI will handle — or is at least expected to handle — an increasing number of customer service interactions.
“In the CX business in total, there's probably $100 billion in North American outsourced customer care,” Johnson said. “Clients are probably driving, on average, a 7% to 10% reduction in volumes per year through the use of automation, and now pretty much all that automation is being driven by AI.”
Those reduced interaction volumes trickle down to fewer jobs, potentially, for human call center agents regardless of who they’re employed by, whether the brand or a BPO.
Brands aren’t coming to TaskUs looking to buy a technology solution, Johnson said. Instead, they expect TaskUs to embed AI into how they work and, thus, increase the ultimate value they deliver as a partner. That means using AI in back-office workflows, scheduling, business intelligence and analytics to bolster and streamline the CX insights TaskUs provides back to its clients.
Johnson expects that people will remain an integral part of the service function, but that means figuring out the role TaskUs plays within the customer interaction even as AI becomes increasingly capable of automating resolutions.
“The world our business was built on [was] a pyramid with high-volume, low-skilled work at the bottom, then escalation and support specialist teams that go up to [an] expert resolution person,” Johnson said. “The world is going to be more of a diamond where AI agents take over the bulk of that scaled work, streamline workflows, eliminate unnecessary work and friction.”
Humans will likely be left with managing the AI agents and handling exceptions in those select cases where the business doesn’t want a machine to make the final decision.
“We're going to engage with a customer directly with empathy and make a judgment call on whether a refund is due in this situation or [if] we can avoid a cancellation or not,” Johnson said.
For TaskUs, that means figuring out how to train and upskill its human workforce to handle those fraught decisions.
“I think the way we're going to do that is by giving them more AI assistance,” he said. “So AI is going to be their copilot, helping them make tough calls.
