Dive Brief:
- Global business process outsourcing provider TaskUs' digital customer experience revenue is growing as clients across multiple sectors adopt AI. The company reported $176 million in Q3 2026 revenue, up 7.1% year over year, for its DCX division on Wednesday. Total service revenue for the quarter was $315 million, a 5.4% year-over-year increase.
- Sales and lead generation solutions comprised part of the DCX revenue growth, along with adoption of agentic AI voice solutions for sales and customer service, executives said. “Across all industry sectors, demand and sales momentum for these offerings remain strong, positioning us for continued adoption of these critical solutions,” Bryce Maddock, co-founder and CEO of TaskUs, said during its earnings call.
- TaskUs expects DCX growth to accelerate in the fourth quarter, as well. “We believe the future of customer care is a seamless blend of AI and human talent resolving complex interactions, and our sustained growth proves this strategy is working,” Maddock said.
Dive Insight:
The blending of human talent with AI assistance is a common refrain among BPOs, CX solution vendors and analysts. Not only does it sound better than “AI will replace people,” but that combined approach is how many enterprises are achieving actual success in serving customers.
BPOs like TaskUs are at the forefront of this AI disruption. They employ thousands of people in different world regions to handle customer service for global enterprises — TaskUs alone employs nearly 65,000. Most BPO CX revenue is still generated by charging per-agent or per-seat.
BPOs make their gross profit on the margin between labor cost in those regions and what they charge per-agent.
“Every contact AI resolves can remove work the BPO was billing for,” Victor Manzanera, BPO sector expert and founder of Scale Edge Group, told CX Dive in an email. “In effect, it is being asked to automate its own revenue. Concentrix said as much when it described ‘aggressively disrupting’ its own traditional work.”
This disruption incentivizes BPOs to adapt their business models. TaskUs uses AI to streamline recruiting, workforce management, quality assurance and for employee HR support. The company has also partnered with Decagon and Regal, which provide AI agent platforms that TaskUs can then deploy on behalf of their enterprise customers.
“We now have nearly 100 deployments of these production-ready AI-enabled tools across our client base, allowing us to enhance and automate critical stages of the customer experience and management of our teammates,” Maddock said.
For enterprises looking to outsource their customer service to a BPO, however, the challenge is figuring out what bottom-line benefit the BPO’s AI capabilities deliver.
“If AI is really changing the service, the buyer should see it in results: lower cost per resolved issue, fewer repeat contacts, faster resolution,” Manzanera said. To get at those answers, prospective buyers of BPO services should ask which results changed on which work and by how much.
“The real test for the buyer is the contract. If it still pays for hours or seats, nobody in it is paid to save you money,” Manzanera said. “Until BPOs are paid for results, the blend is a statement of direction rather than a new model.”
