Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

axios.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 248 posts

Re: AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

#61

Post by thewebguyd »

PhantomHour wrote: post #45
ckorhonen wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t fully agree. Yes, AI can be seen as a cheaper outsourcing option, but there’s also a plausible future where companies lean more on outsourced engineers who are good at wielding AI effectively, to replace domestic mid-level roles. In other words, instead of nullifying outsourcing, AI might actually amplify it by raising the leverage of offshore talent.

Consider the kinds of jobs that are popular with outsourcing right now. Jobs like customer/tech support aren't uniquely suited to outsourcing. (Quite the opposite; People rightfully complain about outsourced support being awful. Training outsourced workers on the fine details of your products/services & your own organisation, nevermind empowering them to do things is much harder) They're jobs that companies can negle…

> But the LLM can tell meemaw to reset her dang router. If that's all you consider support to be (which is almost certainly the case if you outsource it), then you stand nothing to lose from using AI.

I worked in a call center before getting into tech when I was young. I don't have any hard statistics, but by far the majority of calls to support were basic questions or situations (like Meemaw's router) that could easily be solved with a chatbot. If not that, the requests that did require action on accounts could be handled by an LLM with some guardrails, if we can secure against prompt injection.

Companies can most likely eliminate a large chunk of customer service employees with an LLM and the customers would barely notice a difference.

Re: AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

#63

Post by hereme888 »

AI is already so much better than 99% of customer support employees.

It also improves brand reputation by actually paying attention to what customers are saying and responding in a timely manner, with expert-level knowledge, unlike typical customer service reps.

I've used LLMs to help me fix Windows issues using pretty advanced methods, that MS employees would have just told me to either re-install Windows or send them the laptop and pay $hundreds.

Re: AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

#64

Post by mensetmanusman »

daymanstep wrote: post #39
cantrevealname wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI and robotics nullify any comparative advantages low wage countries had If we project long term, could this mean that countries with the most capital to invest in AI and robotics (like the U.S.) could take back manufacturing dominance from countries with low wages (like China)?

China has more robots per capita than the US And the idea that China has low wages is outdated. Companies like Apple don't use China for its low wages, countries like Vietnam have lower wages. China's strength lies in its manufacturing expertise

Western engineers worked relentlessly on knowledge transfer to China to do so, it might be easy to bring back with the 10x industrial subsidies that the CCP provided to do so.

Re: AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

#65

Post by fuzztester »

jsnell wrote: post #6

The actual report (which this article doesn't link to; bad Axios): https://nanda.media.mit.edu/ai_report_2025.pdf

Not Found

The requested URL was not found on this server. Apache/2.4.62 (Debian) Server at nanda.media.mit.edu Port 443

Re: AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

#67

Post by jmyeet »

igleria wrote: post #56
jmyeet wrote: post #31

AI is going to force the issue of having to deal with the inequity in our economic system. And my belief is that this confrontation will be violent and many people are going to die. The fundamental issue is wealth inequality. The ultimate forms of wealth redistribution are war and revolution. I personally believe we are already beyond the point where electoral politics can solve this issue and a violent resolution is…

> personally believe we are already beyond the point where electoral politics can solve this issue and a violent resolution is inevitable. I do think more or less this too, but it could be 4 years or 40 before people get mad enough. And to be honest the tech gap between civilian violence and state sponsored violence has never been wider. OR in other words, civilians don't have reaper drones etc etc.

I agree on time frames. This system can limp on for decades yet. Or fall apart in 5 years (though probably not).

As for the tech gap, I disagree.

The history of post-WW2 warfare is that asymmetric warfare has been profoundly successful, to the poin twhere the US hasn't won a single war (except, arguably, Grenada, if that counts, which it does not) since 1945. And that's a country that spends more on defence that something like the next 23 countries combined (IIRC).

Obviously war isn't exact the same thing but it's honestly not that different to suppressing violent dissent. The difficulty (since 1945) hasn't been defeating an opposing military on the battlefield. The true cost is occupying territory after the fact. And that is basically the same thing.

Ordinary people may not have reeaper drones and as we've seen in Ukraine, consumer drops are still capable of dropping a hand grenade.

Suppressing an insurrection or revolt is unbelievably expensive in terms of manpower, equipment and political will. It is absolutely untenable in the long term.

Re: AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

#68

Post by mensetmanusman »

lan321 wrote: post #10
hunglee2 wrote: post #7

In hindsight, remote working is an obvious stepping stone to offshoring, which itself is an inevitable milestone toward full automation. It is the work we do in in-person collaboration which will keep the moat high against AI disintermediation.

Doubt. The meaningful work in person is organisational, and it's only marginally better onsite due to whiteboard > Excalidraw. Who does what, how it'll all interact, architecture, etc. If an LLM can code the difficult bits and doesn't fall apart once the project isn't a brand new proof of concept, it'll surely be able to pick the correct pattern and tooling and/or power through the mediocre/bad decision.

The invisible hand will provide the answer!

Re: AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

#69

Post by datavirtue »

crazygringo wrote: post #41
candiddevmike wrote: post #12

> Despite $30–40 billion in enterprise investment into GenAI, this report uncovers a surprising result in that 95% of organizations are getting zero return. Oof

This is no different from the personal computer, and it is to be expected. The initial years of adopting new tech have no net return because it's investment . The money saved is offset by the cost of setting up the new tech. But then once the processes all get integrated and the cost of buying and building all the tech gets paid off, it turns into profit. Also, some companies adopt new tech better than others. Some d…

I think it just turns into table stakes.

Re: AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

#70

Post by torginus »

I wonder if AI automation will even lead to a recession in total software engineering revenue.

At my job, thanks to AI, we managed to rewrite one of our boxed vendor tools we were dissatisfied with, to an in-house solution.

I'm sure the company we were ordering from misses the revenue. The SaaS industry is full of products whose value proposition is 'it's cheaper to buy the product from us than hire a guy who handles it in house'

Post reply on HN