RPA, AI and India’s BPO Industry

Last three decades have seen the evolution of IT to a substantial extent; the business world went through an assortment of tech-rejuvenations that eventually become a comprehensive part of business models. This ever-evolving trend continues to empower with the introduction of RPA and AI that are bound to add on the enslavement of business under IT. The technical advancements of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are tantalizing the BPO industry of India the most due to their ability to mimic human actions and intelligence to handle business situations. This particular piece of writing is designed in order to present you a meticulous outlook of India’s BPO industry amid the latest technological encroachments.

The Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) market of India becomes the paramount due to its cheap employment costs and the enormous talent pool of professionals. But in the presence of RPA and AI, the dynamics of the BPO sector are no longer dependent over the cheap and efficient labour provided by countries like India, Malaysia and the Philippines. Both RPA and AI can provide efficient enough Robots (BOTs) that can handle the business processes in an effectual comportment with less cost as well as time-saving abilities. Moreover, the efficiency provided by the Bots is unmatchable as RPA & AI enables increased throughput, accuracy and better data control.

Customer relationship management is one of the major domains of the BPO sector and according to Gartner, about 85% of CRM is expected to be automated by 2020.

In plain words “BOTs are coming to take business productivity to the higher Altitude”

Impact on the BPO industry is massive as most of the front and back office tasks dispensed to this sector are monotonous and only depend on a certain set of logic. RPA alone can handle rule-based business processes and only in 20% of the business requirements need Artificial Intelligence. This combination is massively possible under the present scheme of BOT development going on in the software industry.

The costs associated with RPA & AI are far less than the companies paying to the BPO sector. Due to this particular factor, the BPO industry has to provide services at much lower costs, otherwise, the business houses providing business to BPOs can look forward to in-source their operations. There is every possibility that client organizations would take a Do It Yourself (DIY) approach to manage and automate their business. This model could be termed like Bring Your Own Robot (BYOR) rather than BPO as the reasons for the idea ‘why companies outsource’ are not viable anymore.

The subsequent feature of RPA and AI that is haunting the BPO world is the pace at which the whole concept of BOTs can be implemented for a particular business process. The platforms used for robot development provide extraordinary features that enable BOT development at a pace that was never seen by the software world. 

So, the advantages possessed by the RPA and AI have impacted BPO in a significant way and now Robots are on the verge to take up the business from humans. In this changing paradigm, BPO service providers need to differentiate their offering so that they can add value to the business operations of their customers. The BPO industry definitely has the option to incorporate a new business model based on the services offered by BOTs instead of humans. This shift will enable the BPO industry to sustain itself to a certain extent in the evolving business models.

In this process, there will be huge grinding down of employees in the BPO sector and this will lead to a significant deficit in the BPO based financial realms of countries like India. But if the BPO market fancy to find its feet in inundate of modern sophisticated technologies then they have to slaughter the employee based model and move forward to BOT based environments. Under this approach, the BPO sector can continue to extract the business from the clients and protract itself to an assured extent.