The global BPO industry is going through one of the more turbulent periods in its history. Artificial intelligence is compressing the value of routine tasks. Clients are renegotiating contracts with an expectation of doing more for less. Attrition continues to run at rates that would alarm most other industries. Geopolitical shifts are redrawing the map of where work gets done and who does it.
For most companies in this space, the honest answer to how they are coping involves some combination of cost cutting, headcount restructuring and a great deal of public messaging about digital transformation.
Adarsh Kumar, Co-founder and COO of iEnergizer, has a different answer. And it is grounded in something that tends to get lost in conversations about industry disruption: the long view.
"This industry has always had to evolve," Kumar says. "The companies that struggle in moments like this are usually the ones that were building for the last cycle, not the next one. We have tried to stay ahead of that."
An industry under pressure from all sides
The challenges facing the outsourcing sector in 2026 are not new in kind, but they are new in their combination and intensity.
Automation has eroded the economic logic of large scale manual processing, the business iEnergizer and its peers were originally built on. Clients who once outsourced straightforward back office work are now asking whether software can handle it entirely. In many cases, the honest answer is: partially.
At the same time, the demand for complex, judgement heavy customer interactions has grown. Healthcare queries, financial disputes, legal support, gaming platform moderation: these are categories where a voice or a chat on the other end still needs to be human, informed and contextually aware. The industry is shifting from volume to value, but not every organisation has made that shift cleanly.
Attrition compounds both problems. When experienced people leave, the institutional knowledge they carry walks out with them. Clients feel it. Delivery quality dips. And the cost of continuously retraining a revolving workforce quietly eats into margins that are already being squeezed.
How Kumar reads the moment
iEnergizer is headquartered in Noida and operates across nine global locations, supporting over 100 enterprise clients across healthcare, BFSI, gaming, publishing and legal services. It handles more than 170 million customer interactions a year, across more than 30 languages, with a workforce of over 40,000 people.
Kumar has been building this organisation since the year 2000, when iEnergizer was a small team operating out of Noida with a handful of clients and the kind of uncertainty that comes with starting anything from scratch. Twenty five years of operating through market cycles, technology shifts and a global pandemic gives him a particular way of reading industry disruption.
"Every wave of change in this industry has felt existential to someone," he says. "Offshoring was supposed to destroy domestic employment. The internet was going to make call centres obsolete. Self service was going to end human customer support. None of those predictions came true in the way people expected. What actually happened is the work got more complex, not less. I think the same thing is happening now."
His argument is that AI does not eliminate the need for human judgement in customer experience. It concentrates it. As automation absorbs the predictable parts of a customer interaction, the unpredictable parts, the ones that require empathy, context and accountability, become the entire job. That is a harder job, but it is also a more valuable one.
Stability as a competitive strategy
Where many of iEnergizer's peers have responded to margin pressure by treating workforce costs as the primary lever, Kumar has taken a different position. He has consistently argued that workforce continuity is not a cost. It is a product quality decision, and ultimately a client retention decision.
The logic is straightforward. A team that has managed a client's banking account for three years carries knowledge that cannot be onboarded in a week. A multilingual support centre where people stay long enough to genuinely develop language and cultural fluency delivers a measurably different customer experience than one in constant churn.
iEnergizer has now been certified as a Great Place to Work for three consecutive years. That is not a marketing statistic. It is survey data from tens of thousands of employees across nine global locations, consistently returning a signal that the organisation invests in its people and they know it.
"When your people trust the organisation, they stay," Kumar says. "When they stay, your clients get consistency. When clients get consistency, they extend contracts. The whole chain starts with how you treat the people doing the work."
Navigating what comes next
The outsourcing industry's next three to five years are unlikely to be simpler than the last three. The pace of technology adoption among enterprise clients is accelerating. Workforce expectations are shifting, particularly among younger professionals who have more options and less patience for employers who do not demonstrate genuine investment in their growth.
Kumar's response to that environment is not a pivot or a rebrand. It is, characteristically, a continuation of the same operating philosophy iEnergizer has run on since its earliest years: build for relationships, not transactions. Invest in people before the market forces you to. Stay close enough to clients that you see what they need before they ask for it.
"The companies that will lead this industry in five years are the ones being built right now," Kumar says. "Not the ones announcing the most. The ones doing the most, quietly and consistently, over a long period of time."
From its base in Noida, iEnergizer has been doing exactly that for a quarter of a century. In a sector still searching for its footing, that kind of track record is increasingly rare.
