#95. Outsourcing

Today, we talk about a trend that has taken all businesses by storm, and one that I feel is slowly creeping into our personal lives, which is outsourcing. We talk about the potential benefits as well as downsides of outsourcing in our lives, and end with a daunting question to round things off.

“Outsourcing is inevitable, and I don’t think it’s necessarily treating people like things.”

– Stephen Covey

We live in an efficiency driven world. Organisations have increased focus and efforts on making the best use of time and resources to get the highest bang for their bucks. Lean management, Kaizen, Kanban and numerous other operations management techniques have become an inseparable part of standard operating procedures for companies across the globe. And like every other facet of the world, AI has added to the flavour by reducing the need for companies to do anything menial in their daily jobs.

One such trend that we have seen gain tremendous uptick is outsourcing. In 2025, the global outsourcing market is projected to reach $591.24 billion, with no signs of it slowing down. When we include the shared services market, the number grows to $1.09 trillion. For those wondering what outsourcing is, it is the process of hiring an external entity to perform a portion of the business process that may or may not be influential to the top line (total revenue) or bottom line (total net profit) of the company.

The scope of outsourcing started business process outsourcing or the infamous BPOs. Then the software market caught the fire, with service organisations made and are making billions of dollars. Now, it has finally evolved into gig economy and freelance being some of the latest trends in the space. There are some perceived benefits of outsourcing, with the obvious ones being increased revenues and profits, improved productivity and well, the glue that started it all, efficiency.

This trend of outsourcing is however, no longer limited to the corporate world. Whether we realise it or not, technology has become proxy for us in many realms. For example, shopping used to be a very personal endeavour one would share with loved ones, but now that happens through our cell phones with AI enabled “Personal” shoppers, who basically recommend us stuff we would like based on what it has “learnt” about us.

The example I have just quoted is only one of many, and to be honest, not the one I am concerned about. I am concerned about a faculty we are outsourcing more than anything else, and might I add, unknowingly.

I am talking about our critical thinking ability.

Critical Thinking and Modern Humans

To avoid ambiguity, let me highlight what I mean by critical thinking. The term “critical” stems from the Greek word “kritikos”, which means the ability to “judge or discern”. Therefore, critical thinking, the faculty with which us humans have been blessed, is the ability to evaluate any piece of information and discern relevant facts from irrelevant ones, before forming a concrete judgement of decision. Now anyone reading this will understand that critical thinking adds time to the decision making process, due to the intermediary steps.

However, we live in a fast paced world, we don’t even have time to breathe, let alone think, am I right? Make the most of your time is a saying all of us are indoctrinated with even before we have real decision making abilities. I have been trying to identify, make the most what? Your guess is as good as mine, but I digress.

Computers that used to be a supplementary device to human intelligence became inseparable from it. With development in tech, let’s talk about the preceding trend , which is Generative Artificial Intelligence. Amongst other benefits, GenAI can rapidly generate information, including but not limited to decisions and judgements. And as we all know, we are all in the midst of a massive mental rewiring, where our attention spans are shrinking and we have more information than ever.

So, we have more information, less time and even smaller attention spans. Any guesses where we are going with this?

We are on the verge of outsourcing our critical thinking faculties.

Should we be concerned? Well, YEAH!!

Our critical thinking faculties are what helps us differentiate us from the rest of the species. That is what has placed us at the top of the food chain both socially as well as in all the species. And the questions arises, can we afford to lose our critical thinking faculties?

If you stuck around this far, thank you for your time. If you enjoyed this, share this with one friend of yours whom you think will benefit from reading this. Thanks for reading, and I will see you in the next one. 🙂