Transcript
Matthew: One of the things that I think AI is doing is it's reducing the number of people you need for the same level of productivity. No doubt. It's also increasing the scope of what each individual can do. When I look, I think a team of a hundred probably could be trimmed down to 10 full-time people, but they are doing probably five more things and they're owning more of the judgment. Then I look at, okay, what's the implication of that? Well, if you don't staff up a team of a hundred, you need more of an ownership and a loyalty and a closeness, and something that I think the BPO and outsourcing world, to me, I just look and I'm like, ooh, that doesn't really make any sense anymore. If now I only have 10 people on my team, or let's say I have 10 full-time and 50 contractors rather than 100 total, it doesn't really make sense to me to go pay this BPO who they don't really deeply understand me. We're not building up institutional knowledge. Second level implication is you want people that are actually in the tent versus out of the tent, even if in the tent is contractors or external, but still on your team. Do you think this is more we need more staffing, less BPO?
Maruf Ahmed: I am biased the same way because I'm in the staffing. And I will tell you that what I am saying is that the BPO business is in trouble. BPO business is getting automated far more with the AI agents, and the value prop that was out there, which is again some of those foundational low level repetitive tasks, AI is taking that. And to your point, therefore the workforce that you have becomes even more important. The human judgment, the human relationship, the people that are understanding your vision, the projects that our clients need becomes more important. So staffing does become even more important for our clients, and having partners like Dexian becomes more important for them, because you are providing them with that human talent that they are expecting to do more. The mundane work, the work that could be automated, whether it was machine learning or scripting, did not really happen in 2015 and 2016. But AI seems to be a lot more proficient right now, so I think it's going to happen this time. I think the BPO business definitely is going to get affected by that and you're going to have a lot less of it. Which is why I think when we are looking at the India business, there's a lot of angst there, because a lot of the businesses were running out of those Indian outsourcers that were running BPO.
Staffing becomes even more important, because even in the best of times, you don't want your employee base to be 100% just employee. You want to have your workforce flexibility because you don't have 100% of the work all the time. To have a hundred employees when you really need 100 sometimes, but most of the time you can do with 90 and then projects come in, you need 10 more. That's where you need somebody like us that comes and gives you those ten more, understands you, has relationship with you, understands the talent pool. So I think the staffing business will be fine. It is actually needed a lot more as you are trying to build that right workforce structure.
