#outsourcing · How AI Is Reshaping Work

On August 28, EXL chairman Rohit Kapoor and iMerit founder Radha Basu laid out the logic of a deal worth up to $310M. EXL runs 68,000 seats of exactly the back-office work AI took first. The company it bought sells human judgment.

Globant reported $614.4M in Q2 on August 13, against $614.2M a year earlier, with 2,673 fewer employees. Same revenue, fewer people, and gross margin went the wrong way: 33.9% against 35.4%.

Genpact posted $1.343B in Q2 revenue, up 7.1%, with employees down both sequentially and year over year. The CEO said the company is 「just getting started」 on headcount.

AI agents are absorbing routine support work and the headcount is following: Uber cut about 10% of customer service, Microsoft's support org shrank by 10,000, and outsourcing hubs are next.

Sama, Meta's data-annotation contractor in Nairobi, sent redundancy notices to 1,108 employees on April 16 after Meta terminated the contract they had been staffing. Their job was labeling the images and bathroom-footage that trained Meta's Ray-Ban AI glasses. Their reward for training the AI: the AI no longer needs them.