If you came into this Contact Centre Network webinar expecting another surface-level conversation about chatbots and automation, you quickly realised this discussion was something very different.
Hosted by Garry Gormley, the session brought together two industry voices with deep but very different perspectives on the future of outsourcing and AI: Jimmy Hosang and Justin Aldrich.
At the centre of the debate was a critical question facing the entire customer operations industry:
What happens to the BPO market as Agentic AI moves from theory to reality?
And perhaps more importantly:
Does AI replace the traditional outsourcing model, or completely reinvent it?
From the opening minutes, the discussion moved beyond the usual “AI is coming” narrative. Instead, the conversation focused on the operational reality of what businesses are already seeing inside customer service, sales, and support environments.
As Garry Gormley explained early in the discussion, “Agentic AI is starting to rear its head in every single conversation that I’m having.” That statement alone captured the mood of the market. AI is no longer a future trend for contact centres, it is now shaping strategic decisions around workforce models, operating costs, customer journeys, and outsourcing partnerships.
Justin Aldrich brought the perspective of someone who has spent more than two decades inside the BPO industry. Reflecting on how the sector has evolved, he acknowledged that outsourcing has always had to adapt to changing customer expectations and technology shifts.
But he was equally clear that this next wave feels fundamentally different.
In one of the standout moments of the webinar, Justin described Agentic AI as being more than simple automation:
“Rather than something doing just a specific task and being programmed to do that task, it’s taking that task further, following through to a full resolution, managing your next action, learning and evolving as that goes on.”
That distinction became a major theme throughout the session.
Traditional automation has typically focused on isolated tasks, password resets, routing calls, or answering FAQs. Agentic AI, however, introduces systems capable of reasoning, decision-making, orchestration, and autonomous action across entire workflows.
That changes the economics of customer operations completely.
For years, BPOs competed largely on labour arbitrage: finding ways to deliver customer service more efficiently through scale, process optimisation, and offshore delivery models. But as Jimmy Hosang explained, the market is now moving toward something far more outcome-driven.
One of the strongest points Jimmy made was around the rapidly collapsing cost of AI capability. He challenged the traditional ROI narrative many providers still use when positioning AI solutions.
As he put it:
“There’s players in the market now… you don’t have to spend five hundred pounds a month, or three hundred pounds a month. You can spend thirty pounds a month and get that saving.”
That comment highlighted a major disruption point for the industry.
When advanced AI becomes cheaper, more accessible, and easier to deploy, the barrier to entry lowers dramatically. Suddenly, businesses that once relied heavily on large-scale outsourced operations may start questioning which parts of their customer journey truly need human intervention at all.
But despite the intensity of the AI discussion, neither speaker positioned this as the death of people within customer operations.
In fact, one of the most refreshing aspects of the conversation was the balanced perspective both Jimmy and Justin brought to the debate.
“The future of customer operations won’t belong to the businesses with the biggest workforce — it will belong to the organisations that can intelligently orchestrate humans and AI together to create effortless experiences at scale.”
Justin made this point particularly well when discussing the role humans will continue to play in the future operating model:
“People are still a critical, key, brilliant piece of resource and expertise.”
That statement grounded the discussion in reality.
The future described during the webinar was not one where humans disappear entirely. Instead, it was a future where human capability becomes more valuable precisely because AI removes repetitive, process-heavy work.
The real challenge for BPOs, therefore, may not simply be “adopting AI.”
It may be redefining what human value actually looks like inside customer operations.
Throughout the webinar, we address the growing tension between two competing futures for the outsourcing market.
On one side sits the traditional BPO model built around scale, headcount, and efficiency. On the other sits a rapidly emerging AI-first model focused on orchestration, autonomy, and intelligent automation.
The question is whether existing BPO providers evolve quickly enough to bridge those two worlds.
Justin shared his thoughts on how AI is reshaping BPO Economics in saying:
“Agentic AI isn’t just automating tasks — it’s fundamentally reshaping the economics of the BPO market and forcing us to rethink where human value truly sits in the customer journey.”
Jimmy Hosang hinted that the winners in this new landscape will not necessarily be the organisations with the largest operational footprint. Instead, success may belong to those capable of combining customer understanding, operational expertise, and AI orchestration into something genuinely transformational.
For contact centre leaders watching the session, the message was clear:
This is not simply another technology upgrade cycle.
This is a redesign of how customer operations function altogether.
And while AI dominated much of the discussion, the webinar repeatedly returned to a more important theme, customer experience itself.
Because ultimately, the success of Agentic AI will not be measured by how many jobs it replaces.
It will be measured by whether it creates faster, easier, smarter, and more human customer experiences.
That is where the conversation became particularly powerful.
The webinar challenged leaders to stop thinking about AI purely as a cost-saving mechanism and start viewing it as a capability amplifier, something that can remove friction, reduce customer effort, and allow people to focus on moments that genuinely require empathy, judgement, and creativity.
As the session closed, one thing became increasingly obvious:
The BPO market is not disappearing.
But it is being forced to reinvent itself faster than ever before.
And the organisations that survive this transition will likely be those that stop selling labour, and start delivering intelligence, outcomes, and experience design at scale.
