Botsourcing, Roboshoring or Virtual Backoffice? Perspectives on Implementing Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Abstract

Services, the largest component of the world's economy, have significant impact on shaping economic and social relations between organizations and human beings. For many decades, services sector has been cyclically evolving and changing, which has lately accelerated particularly due to the strong influence of emerging technologies. Certain solutions became a thing of the past, some started to transform faster, while others emerged disturbingly, revolutionizing current state of art. The ways and modes services enable humans and technologies to interact and cocreate value have also started to take new, innovative and fascinating forms. Over the past years, global services market got centralized and technologically reshaped influencing lives of us all. Offshoring (global sourcing), enabled by cloud computing, made multiple transnational companies take advantage of migrating some operational processes to different locations (‘nearshore’ or ‘farshore’).