This is especially true in today’s fast-moving AI real world where most organizations will take on offshore firms with talented people who specialize in innovative data mining, AI development, and software engineering. The advantages of outsourcing include speed, expertise, and some areas cost efficiency.
Introduction
Outsourcing is not something new. In my opinion, U.S.-and-based consumer goods companies perform probably around 30% of all software and analytics development activities onshore and 70% offshore. Yet with real AI improvements, companies must demand more from the firms to which they outsource. Staff augmentation guys pitch the benefits of AI to big companies but don’t leverage AI to do their work. This highlights the significance of onshore and offshore software development.
New expectations with respect to outsourcing are coming into play. Hence, staff augmentation now must change to bring off-the-shelf AI toolkits and components tailored to the specific needs of their customers in order to attain faster, better, and cheaper software and AI development than ever before.
A Requirement For Staff Augmentation
The IBM Global AI Adoption Index states that the biggest barrier to AI adoption in any organization is talent. More than a third of the IT executives surveyed commented that people with limited AI skills have hindered AI adoption.
There are clear cost-savings when it comes to offshore data scientists and data engineers. For example, an organization from overseas could supply a large U.S.-based corporation with an exclusive team of AI-trained engineers at $50 to $125 an hour per person, for as many months as needed. By comparison, should that same large organization employ an onshore, full-time AI-trained engineer, this could require an outlay of mid-six-figure cash compensation, stock, benefits, office space, equipment, and training. The one full-time employee is effectively going to cost $175 to $500 an hour, based on experience.
Outsourcing, of course, can be tricky. The outsourced team may lack a deeper understanding of the business context, industry-specific requirements, or technical strategic goals, all of which can shape the relevance and efficacy of any AI solution. This is something that can be solved by choosing an industry-specialized staff augmentation partner, but AI has changed the rules.
Who Is An Ideal Staff Augmentation Partner?
Your staff augmentation partner needs to ensure that individuals deliver AI code that develops using that AI code for software development or data science tasks. Companies across the industries are now expecting outsourcing firms to bring AI-powered tools that allow their developers to work better, faster, and more intelligently. These partners should have libraries, algorithms, repositories of code, components, toolkits, or pre-built solutions that can provide much richer results for that client.
If a consumer brand outsourced a data engineer to process and analyze a mountain of Amazon sales data, it should be expected that the AI-assisted data engineer brings AI code to automate to a reasonable degree the extraction and representation of sales data from Amazon.
At the very least, companies using staff augmentation partners for analytics or AI applications should demand that the people assigned to them come equipped with libraries that provide explainable results. The AI accreditation engineer would not only do your tasks on sales forecasting for convenience stores but will also compellingly establish causation with parameters beyond your control like gas prices.
Expectations In Outsourcing In 2025
Data scientist outsourcing for enhancing analytics of the brand team for a fast-moving consumer goods company is easy and inexpensive. Done correctly, I have seen auxiliary engagement save significant costs that were lower than the 30% increase in project or output quality and greater than 40% less time for project completion. The list could go on with examples from industries that have been outsourcing for many purposes, including AI-based insight and predictive analytics. So let us advocate for more active engagement from outsourcing partners as we go into the new year. For those companies that depend on AI for efficient delivery, it is important to ensure that their outsourcing partners can design customized solutions. They should bring custom tools to the engagement: AI toolkits, libraries, dashboards, and components that populate data and provide insights in a customized manner.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What are the characteristics of an ideal staff augmentation partner?
Your staff augmentation partner needs to ensure that individuals deliver AI code that develops using that AI code for software development or data science tasks. Companies across the industries are now expecting outsourcing firms to bring AI-powered tools that allow their developers to work better, faster, and more intelligently. These partners should have libraries, algorithms, repositories of code, components, toolkits, or pre-built solutions that can provide much richer results for that client.
What is meant by offshore software development?
Offshore development is the act of outsourcing the software project to a company located in another country. For example, if your company is in the United States, any company within the boundaries of the United States is considered to be onshore.
