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Challenge: The aim of this study was to find out how emerging technologies will impact the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry in terms of automation of presently manually handled processes. In the second step the specific impact on the client's business was to be examined.

Our Involvement: We approached the study from a secondary as well as a primary research angle. A comprehensive survey among top management of the leading Indian BPO companies was carried out to gain insights on their perception of the impact of emerging technologies on the industry. Subsequently, three of the most important automation technology fields; Voice Recognition, OCR/ICR and Web 2.0 technologies were analyzed in detail. We applied our findings to the outsourced business processes of our client and assessed the automation potential presently and within a 5-year forecast. This led to the development of two alternate scenarios.

Outcome: It was found out that BPO providers dealing with low-end work, which requires low or no judgment and creativity from the employees, and which can be easily codified and digitized, will face the highest threat of automation through technologies. Simple data-entry and data processing work will face the highest rates of automation in the future, closely followed by inbound voice processes. Outbound voice processes are seen to be least susceptible to automation by technologies in the BPO field. Voice Recognition, OCR/ICR and technologies related to the Web 2.0 field will have the highest automation impact on the industry. The market for voice recognition technology is growing at a yearly rate of around 22% and is expected to cross 3 billion USD by 2010. The market for OCR technology is estimated to grow at around 30% each year and is expected to reach 3.5 billion USD by 2010.

We advised our client to proactively respond to the automation threat by building up expertise in processes which are more complex and thereby higher in the BPO value chain. We also specifically advised the client on implementing some automation technologies into the present process execution, thereby differentiating its service offering from the competition and anticipating future technology impact