How BPOs Can Differentiate and Deliver on Value: Lessons on AI, Compliance, and Talent

For years, business process outsourcing providers (BPOs) won contracts by being the cheaper option. But the clients signing contracts today expect more: innovation, compliance depth, and a partner invested in their long-term plans.

Hubstaff’s Growth & Partner Marketer (Kylie Bonassi) and Product Marketing Manager (Aubrey Nekvinda) hosted a webinar with three leaders who live that shift daily to dig into what’s working, what’s changing, and where the biggest opportunities lie. On the panel:

• Dr. Gleb Tsipursky. CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts and an expert in strategic decision-making and risk management.
• David Judge. CEO of Affordable Staff, a managed outsourcing provider serving Australian and New Zealand businesses.
• Subho Pati Sanyal. COO of Nistula Group, with deep expertise in BPO operations and global workforce management.

You can watch the full recording below or read on for the key takeaways.

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The one shift BPO leaders need to make now

Kylie opened by asking each panelist the same question: What’s the single biggest shift a BPO leader needs to make today to stay competitive?

Gleb’s answer was technological, and specifically about generative AI. He consults with Fortune 500 and Fortune 1,000 firms on AI adoption, and he’s watching clients move processes they once outsourced over to generative AI, or trim the scope of what they send to providers.

His advice is to figure out which of your business processes are easiest to hand to generative AI, and focus on the ones that are hardest. That question should shape your medium- and long-term outlook before the disruption arrives, because it’s already underway.

David came at it from the talent side. Post-COVID, employees compare offers and ask themselves which company offers them something the other doesn’t.

So a BPO has to differentiate itself as an employer of choice, and AI tools are part of that offer too: tools that make your team’s work easier make you a magnet for the people you want.

Subho’s take: technology in BPO has grown from an efficiency booster into what he called an “architect of business reinvention.”

Automation used to mean reducing human effort. He now measures it by how much it amplifies human intelligence, and he measures BPO success by agility, innovation, and how well a provider future-proofs its clients.

Gleb added a warning about the alternative. Complacency is the biggest risk he sees, because a BPO selling efficiency alone differentiates on cost only. “You’re essentially running the race to the bottom,” he said.

His fix? Get close to each client’s strategic plan several years out, and start building the services they’ll need before they’ve asked for them.

Automation is an ecosystem shift

When we polled attendees on their biggest scaling challenge, attracting and retaining top talent led with over 55%, followed by keeping up with technology and managing client expectations.

More on talent below, but the discussion turned first to how teams get automation wrong.

Subho named the most common mistake: treating automation as a plug-and-play purchase. Too many BPOs deploy it “like a patchwork quilt,” he said. A few scattered RPA bots here, a chatbot there, with no broader strategy behind them. 

His analogy: upgrading your car’s engine while ignoring the brakes and suspension. The fix is designing automation around customer success, workforce enablement, and long-term scale, with compliance as the non-negotiable foundation.

David shared what that looks like at ground level. His team once used a screening spreadsheet that took applicants three to four hours to complete and correct by hand, with conditional formatting turning cells green when everything checked out.

Uploading it to an AI tool cut the work to milliseconds. And it did something bigger: attention to detail had been the single biggest gap his team flagged in hiring, and automation took it off the table.

The compliance blind spots that catch BPOs off guard

Our second poll asked about compliance specifically. Scaling compliance without slowing operations topped the list, with data privacy and security risks close behind and evolving global regulations in third.

Gleb walked through the blind spots he sees most often:

• Treating compliance as an onboarding task. Many BPOs earn an initial certification when a client signs, then set up no system for ongoing monitoring and adjustment. When the client’s compliance needs evolve, there’s no channel for the provider to keep pace.
• Poor visibility into the client’s compliance team. Large clients tend to announce policy changes and expect third parties to catch up. Smaller BPOs with thin compliance resources often can’t see those changes coming, which leaves them exposed.
• Jurisdiction gaps. GDPR and the EU AI Act are just two examples. Providers who don’t adapt their practices to each client’s local requirements carry legal and financial risks that stays invisible until it lands.

He pointed to the Samsung incident, where an engineer pasted internal code into ChatGPT, and the company responded by banning the tool.

His question for BPOs: What if that had been a worker you provided? Many banks now restrict generative AI to internal tools only. If you’re serving those clients on commercially available AI, you may already be out of step with their standards without knowing it.

Building a compliance culture that scales

Subho’s framing, which he returned to throughout the session: “Compliance is a culture.” A BPO should have every box ready before the client shows up to check them, and leadership has to stay personally invested instead of delegating the whole thing to a Chief Information Security Officer (CISO).

The clients of his who’ve had the smoothest compliance relationships all work this way.

David has lived that rollout through Affordable Staff’s ISO 27001 certification. You can view compliance as a cost or as an investment, he said, and the difference shows in how leadership behaves.

His rule is lead by example: change can’t be announced from the top while the top does something different. Walk up to anyone in his business and ask about the security policy or the quality policy, and they can answer, because the whole company owns it together.

Winning talent as an employer of choice

The webinar’s biggest poll result deserved its own discussion. David remembers getting 100 applicants per role when Affordable Staff started 13 years ago.

Today’s market runs on different expectations, so the question flips: why should someone work for you instead of the business next door offering the same pay and stability?

His answers:

• Build a real service offering for your team. Affordable Staff gives every team member a package called Total Rewards that spells out what working there means across five categories.
• Watch your language. David called the company’s own name an oxymoron because he avoids the word staff entirely. “Staff is like a stick that you beat someone with,” he said. People work with the company, and the operating concept is empowerment.

Subho attacked the same problem structurally. Attrition is the nature of the BPO business, so his company built what it calls a human resource operating system: hiring, training, and operations integrated into one cycle instead of three departments blaming each other when a hire doesn’t work out.

On upskilling, he was blunt: “BPOs that don’t build a culture of learning are already obsolete. They just don’t know it yet.”

The industry moves too fast for one-time training models, so his recommendation is to embed learning into the workflow itself:

• Microlearning. Short lessons delivered in real time, inside the workday, so training stops competing with operations for hours.
• AI-driven personalized training paths. Training that adapts to each person’s role and current skill gaps instead of running the whole floor through the same course.
• Experiential learning. People learn by doing, which BPO work supports naturally because live processes double as the training ground.
• Peer mentorship. Engagement-based mentoring that moves knowledge between team members without pulling anyone into a classroom.

Leadership sets the tone: when upskilling is a KPI at the top, it becomes a movement through the whole organization.

Q&A: Sales pipelines and price pressure

Two audience questions closed the session:

How do you maintain an ongoing level of sales?

Stay relevant in the verticals you serve, David said.

Subho described the deeper change behind that: client-vendor relationships are becoming client-partner relationships, and consultative partners who future-proof a client’s business are displacing purely transactional ones.

David illustrated the stakes with a 350-seat engineering BPO he’d spoken with. Its leader admitted AI could already do some of the tasks clients outsource to him, and his plan was to wait and see.

David’s question back was the one every BPO should be asking: what can your team do that the AI can’t?

Should you worry about competitors undercutting you on price?

If you’re stuck competing on price, revisit your model, David said. Affordable Staff wins clients from cheaper providers on the strength of its offer, summed up in the company’s stated purpose: inspire confidence and get it done together.

Gleb added a structural option: success-based pricing. Commit to metrics with your client and tie rewards to hitting them, so your bid makes you a partner in their outcome rather than a line item.

Ready to build your lean advantage?

Cost still matters to clients, but it stopped being the deciding factor a while ago.

The panel kept coming back to the same three moves: 

1. Focus your services on work AI can’t easily absorb.
2. Make compliance something every employee owns.
3. Give good people concrete reasons to join and stay.

If you’re wondering where to start, borrow David’s question and point it at your own business: what can your team do that AI can’t? The answer tells you what to sell, what to automate, and who to hire next.