Shyam is not supposed to think too hard at 2 a.m. A 25-year-old call-centre agent in Bengaluru, he is measured by the minute—average handle time, in industry jargon. His 19th query of the night, a refund on a flight ticket, is solved in six minutes flat. Not by him, exactly. On his screen, a box flashes prompts, takes notes, and drafts a summary.

“He is always there,” Shyam said of the AI copilot that shadows his every call. But that presence is more than a productivity tool.

Because every tab Shyam clicks, every claim he files, isn’t just resolving a query. It’s training data. And the AI that studies him is the same one that could one day replace him. Multiply Shyam by hundreds of thousands of service workers across India, and there’s an industry that is simultaneously doing its job and rehearsing its own obsolescence. Naturally, global firms have noticed.

In July, Capgemini paidReutersCapgemini to buy outsourcing firm WNS for $3.3 billion in AI push $3.3 billion for WNS Global, a homegrown Business Process Management (BPM) giant. But it wasn’t the headset-wearing staff that drew the French consultancy’s eye. What it wanted was invisible: three decades’ worth of workflow data. Insurance claims, late invoices, refund approvals, and everything the industry has been perfecting for clients abroad is now the raw material for the next frontier of automation, agentic AI. Not chatbots that answer questions, but systems that run entire workflows end to end.

For Capgemini, WNS’s terabytes of process data will feed its Perform AI platform. For India, the deal serves as a reminder that the most valuable export of its $54 billion BPM industry may no longer be people.

India holds around 60% of the global BPM market, according to industry body Nasscom, and its call-centres have long been caricatured as the world’s problem-solvers on cheap labour. But the same processes once sold as outsourced services can now be turned into proprietary products—if companies know how. So far, most Indian BPMs do not. 

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